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SECANT JOPY, 

THE SUPERLATIVE 

AND OTHER ESSAYS 



BY 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



WITH NOTES 




HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

Boston : 4 Park Street ; New York : 11 East Seventeenth Street 
Chicago : 378-388 Wabash Avenue 

^ht 0iitocri5iDc pre??, CambriDoe 



CONTENTS 

FASE 

Intboductory Note iii 

Emerson's Career vi 

The Superlative 1 

Uses of Great Men 1*7 

Shakespeare: or, The Poet 47 

Social Aims 76 

Notes 103 

25889 



Copyright, 1875 and 1876, 
By RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 

Copyright, 1883, 
By EDWARD W. EMERSON. 

Copyright, 1899, 
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

All rights reserved. 



\ 



■b 



if 



V 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Company. 






INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 

In a previous number (42) of the Riverside 
Literature Series^ a small group of Emerson's 
essays was presented, and the opportunity was 
taken of giving a brief biographical account of 
the writer. In connection with this number, there- 
fore, only a table of dates is given for conven- 
ient reference by the student. Another number 
(113) contains a selection from Emerson's poems. 
Whether one is reading his prose or his poetry, 
one is aware of that power which expressed itself 
in assertion, direct or indirect, rather than in argu- 
ment or reasoning. It was the seer who spoke or 
sang in Emerson, and this advantage the reader 
has in listening to him, that there is no uncertain 
sound. Every sentence is struck out with decision 
and without modifications. There is thus a frosty 
quality in the speech which tingles the ears, and 
one goes through an essay as if he were taking 
a walk on a clear wintry morning. 

The group here presented, though the essays are 
taken from different volumes, has a general co- 
herence as regards the education of the young 
American. In more than one passage Emerson 



IV INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 

has expressed his contempt for what he calls the 
" peacock " in American life, the strutting, loud- 
voiced style ; and, in the essay on " The Superla- 
tive " he gathers into one emphatic speech the 
lesson of moderation in language, dress, and 
manners, which both springs from, and leads to, 
moderation and temperance in life. The lesson, 
needed as it is, would be incomplete if there were 
not coupled with it an enthusiasm for high ideals, 
— the flaming torch which Emerson carried as a 
leader of men ; and the two essays which follow, 
"Uses of Great Men " and " Shakspeare; or. The 
Poet," are vivid illustrations of the generous side 
of Emerson's nature. The second does a special 
service in giving a good concrete illustration of 
the doctrines laid down in the first. 

Finally the essay on " Social Aims " contains 
wise principles with which to enter upon the con- 
scious membership of society. There comes a time, 
early or late, in every one's life, when individuality 
asserts itself strongly, and the three earlier essays 
reinforce, as Emerson mainly does in his writings, 
the consciousness of individual worth. But, at 
the same time, generally, one also becomes aware 
that he is a member of society, and not simply one 
of a family, and the doctrines taught in "Social 
Aims " are sound, stimulating, and corrective. 

Emerson provokes questions in an Ingenious 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE. V 

mind, but he does not irritate the questioning- 
faculty. It is a good plan to read one of these 
essays heartily, with an abandonment to the plea- 
sure of listening to a courageous, wise master. It 
is well to read it again and again till the ideas 
have taken good hold of the mind ; and then to 
challenge the assertions. Is this really so ? What 
illustration do I find in my own practice ? Does 
he not go too far ? Is there not something to be 
said on the other side ? Like Socrates, Emerson 
says sharply to each person, Know thyself ; and 
one of the best results of reading his essays is to 
be found in the habit of reflecting soberly on one's 
principles in the conduct of life. 

A few notes will be found at the end of the 
number, but the speech is usually so direct as not 
to call for explanation. 



EMERSON'S CAREER. 

Born in Boston, May 25, 1803. 

Enters the Latin School, 1813. 

Is taken to Concord to live in the old manse, 1814. 

Returns to Boston, 1815. 

Enters Harvard College, August, 1817. 

Is graduated, 1821. 

Teaches in a school for young ladies, 1821-24. 

Returns to Cambridge to study divinity, 1825. 

Licensed to preach, .October 10, 1826. 

Goes South for his health, November 25, 1826. 

Returns, June, 1827. 

Spends a year in Cambridge, preaching often, 1827-28. 

Is ordained as colleague of Rev. Henry Ware, Jr., minister 

of the Second Church, Boston, March 11, 1829. 
Is married to Ellen Louisa Tucker, September, 1829. 
His wife dies, 1831. 

Resigns his charge, December 22, 1832. 
Sails for Europe, December 25, 1832. 
Returns, September, 1833. 
Begins to lecture, November, 1833. 
Goes to Concord to live, October, 1834. 
Is married to Lydia Jackson, September, 1835. 
Secures the publication of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus^ 1836. 
Takes part in the founding of The Dial, September, 

1836. 
Publishes Nature, September, 1836. 



EMERSON'S CAREER. Vll 

Delivers his Phi Beta Kappa address on The American 
Scholar, August 31, 1837 (called by Dr. Holmes "our 
Intellectual Declaration of Independence "). 

Publishes his first series of Essays, 1841. 

Publishes his first volume of Poems, 1846. 

Makes a second visit to England, 1847. 

Returns to Concord, 1848. 

Publishes Representative Men, 1850. 

Publishes English Traits, 1856. 

Receives from Harvard the degree of LL. D., 1866. 

Becomes an Overseer of Harvard College, 1867. 

Makes a visit to California, 1871. 

Loses his house by fire, and it is rebuilt by friends, 1872. 

A third journey to Europe, October, 1872. 

Dies, April 27, 1882. 



THE SUPERLATIVE AND OTHER 

ESSAYS. 



THE SUPERLATIVE. 



The doctrine o£ temperance is one of many 
degrees. It is usually taught on a low platform, 
but one of great necessity, — that of meats and 
drinks, and its importance cannot be denied and 
hardly exaggerated. But it is a long way from the 
Maine Law to the heights of absolute self-command 
which respect the conservatism of the entire ener- 
gies of the body, the mind, and the soul. I wish 
to point at some of its higher functions as it enters 
into mind and character. 

There is a superlative temperament which has 
no medium range, but swiftly oscillates from the 
freezing to the boiling point, and which affects the 
manners of those who share it with a certain des- 
peration. Their aspect is grimace. They go tear- 
ing, convulsed through life, — wailing, praying, ex- 
claiming, swearing. We talk, sometimes, with peo- 
ple whose conversation would lead you to suppose 
that they had lived in a museum, where all the 
objects were monsters and extremes. Their good 



2 THE SUPERLATIVE. 

people are phoenixes; their naughty are like the 
prophet's figs. They use the superlative of gram- 
mar : " most perfect," " most exquisite," " most 
horrible." Like the French, they are enchanted, 
they are desolate, because you have got or have not 
got a shoe-string or a wafer you happen to want, — 
not perceiving that superlatives are diminutives, 
and weaken ; that the positive is the sinew of 
speech, the superlative the fat. If the talker lose 
a tooth, he thinks the universal thaw and dissolu- 
tion of things has come. Controvert his opinion 
and he cries " Persecution ! " and reckons himself 
with Saint Barnabas, who was sawn in two. 

Especially we note this tendency to extremes 
in the pleasant excitement of horror-mongers. Is 
there something so delicious in disasters and pain ? 
Bad news is always exaggerated, and we may chal- 
lenge Providence to send a fact so tragical that we 
cannot contrive to make it a little worse in our 
gossip. 

All this comes of poverty. We are unskilful 
definers. From want of skill to convey quality, 
we hope to move admiration by quantity. Lan- 
guage should aim to describe the fact. It is not 
enough to suggest it and magnify it. Sharper 
sight would indicate the true line. 'T is very wea- 
risome, this straining talk, these experiences all 
exquisite, intense and tremendous, — " The best I 



THE SUPERLATIVE. 3 

ever saw ; " " I never in my life ! " One wishes 
these terms gazetted and forbidden. Every favor- 
ite is not a cherub, nor every cat a griffin, nor each 
mipleasing person a dark, diabolical intriguer ; nor 
agonies, excruciations nor ecstasies our daily bread, 

Horace Walpole relates that in the expecta- 
tion, current in London a century ago, of a great 
earthquake, some people provided themselves with 
dresses for the occasion. But one would not wear 
earthquake dresses or resurrection robes for a work- 
ing jacket, nor make a codicil to his will whenever 
he goes out to ride; and the secrets of death, 
judgment and eternity are tedious when recurring 
as minute-guns. Thousands of people live and die 
who were never, on a single occasion, hungry or 
thirsty, or furious or terrified. The books say, " It 
made my hair stand on end ! " Who, in our muni- 
cipal life, ever had such an experience ? Indeed, 
I believe that much of the rhetoric of terror, — 
" It froze my blood," " It made my knees knock," 
etc. — most men have realized only in dreams and 
nightmares. 

Then there is an inverted superlative, or superla- 
tive contrary, which shivers, like Demophoon, in 
the sun : wants fan and parasol on the cold Friday ; 
is tired by sleep ; feeds on drugs and poisons ; finds 
the rainbow a discoloration ; hates birds and flow- 
ers. 



4 THE SUPERLATIVE. 

The exaggeration of which I complain makes 
plain fact the more welcome and refreshing. It is 
curious that a face magnified in a concave mirror 
loses its expression. All this overstatement is 
needless. A little fact is worth a whole limbo of 
dreams, and I can well spare the exaggerations 
which appear to me screens to conceal ignorance. 
Among these glorifiers, the coldest stickler for 
names and dates and measures cannot lament his 
criticism and coldness of fancy. Think how much 
pains astronomers and opticians have taken to pro- 
cure an achromatic lens. Discovery in the heavens 
has waited for it ; discovery on the face of the earth 
not less. I hear without sympathy the complaint 
of young and ardent persons that they find life no 
region of romance, with no enchanter, no giant, no 
fairies, nor even muses. I am very much indebted 
to my eyes, and am content that they should see 
the real world, always geometrically finished with- 
out blur or halo. The more I am engaged with it 
the more it suffices. 

How impatient we are, in these northern lati- 
tudes, of looseness and intemperance in speech ! 
Our measure of success is the moderation and low 
level of an individual's judgment. Doctor Chan- 
ning's piety and wisdom had such weight that, in 
Boston, the popular idea of religion was whatever 
this eminent divine held. But I remember that 



THE SUPERLATIVE. 6 

his best friend, a man of guarded lips, speaking of 
him in a circle of his admirers, said : " I have 
known him long, I have studied his character, and 
I believe him capable of virtue." An eminent 
French journalist paid a high compliment to the 
Duke of Wellington, when his documents were 
published : " Here are twelve volumes of military 
dispatches, and the word glory is not foimd in 
them." 

The English mind is arithmetical, values exact- 
ness, likes literal statement ; stigmatizes any heat 
or hyperbole as Irish, French, Italian, and infers 
weakness and inconsequence of character in speak- 
ers who use it. It does not love the superlative 
but the positive degree. Our customary and me- 
chanical existence is not favorable to flights ; long 
nights and frost hold us pretty fast to realities. 
The people of English stock, in all countries, are a 
solid people, wearing good hats and shoes, and own- 
ers of land whose title-deeds are properly recorded. 
Their houses are of wood, and brick, and stone, not 
designed to reel in earthquakes, nor blow about 
through the air much in hurricanes, nor to be lost 
under sand-drifts, nor to be made bonfires of by 
whimsical viziers ; but to stand as commodious, 
rentable tenements for a century or two. AH our 
manner of life is on a secure and moderate pattern, 
such as can last. Violence and extravagance are, 



6 THE SUPERLATIVE. 

once for all, distasteful ; competence, quiet, com- 
fort, are the agreed weKare. 

Ever a low style is best. "I judge by every 
man's truth of his degree of understanding," said 
Chesterfield. And I do not know any advantage 
more conspicuous which a man owes to his experi- 
ence in markets and the Exchange, or politics, than 
the caution and accuracy he acquires in his report 
of facts. " Uncle Joel's news is always true," said 
a person to me with obvious satisfaction, and said 
it justly ; for the old head, after deceiving and be- 
ing deceived many times, thinks, " What 's the use 
of having to unsay to-day what I said yesterday ? 
I will not be responsible ; I will not add an epi- 
thet. I will be as moderate as the fact, and will 
use the same expression, without color, which I re- 
ceived ; and rather repeat it several times, word 
for word, than vary it ever so little." 

The first valuable power in a reasonable mind, 
one would say, was the power of plain statement, 
or the power to receive things as they befall, and 
to transfer the picture of them to another mind un- 
altered. 'T is a good rule of rhetoric which Schle- 
gel gives, — "In good prose, every word is under- 
scored ; " which, I suppose, means. Never italicize, 

Spartans, stoics, heroes, saints and gods use a 
short and positive speech. They are never off their 
centres. As soon as they swell and paint and find 



THE SUPERLATIVE. 7 

truth not enough for them, softening of the brain 
has already begun. It seems as if inflation were a 
disease incident to. too much use of words, and the 
remedy lay in recourse to things. I am daily 
struck with the forcible understatement of people 
who have no literary habit. The low expression is 
strong and agreeable. The citizen dwells in delu- 
sions. His dress and draperies, house and stables, 
occupy him. The poor countryman, having no cir- 
cumstance of carpets, coaches, dinners, wine and 
dancing in his head to confuse him, is able to look 
straight at you, without refraction or prismatic glo- 
ries, and he sees whether you see straight also, or 
whether your head is addled by this mixture of 
wines. 

The conunon people diminish : " a cold snap ; " 
" it rains easy ; " " good haying weather." When 
a farmer means to tell you that he is doing well 
with his farm, he says, " I don't work as hard as I 
did, and I don't mean to." When he wishes to 
condemn any treatment of soils or of stock, he says, 
'* It won't do any good." Under the Catskill 
Mountains the boy in the steamboat said, " Come 
up here, Tony ; it looks pretty out-of-doors." The 
farmers in the region do not call particular sum- 
mits, as KiUington, Camel's Hump, Saddle-back, 
etc., mountains, but only " them 'ere rises," and 
reserve the word mountains for the range. 



8 THE SUPERLATIVE. 

I once attended a dinner given to a great state 
functionary by functionaries, — men of law, state, 
and trade. The guest was a great man in his own 
country and an honored diplomatist in this. His 
health was drunk with some acknowledgment of his 
distinguished services to both countries, and fol- 
lowed by nine cold hurrahs. There was the vicious 
superlative. Then the great official spoke and beat 
liis breast, and declared that he should remember 
this honor to the latest moment of his existence. 
He was answered again by officials. Pity, thought 
I, they should lie so about their keen sensibility 
to the nine cold hurrahs and to the commonplace 
compliment of a dinner. Men of the world value 
truth, in proportion to their ability ; not by its sa- 
credness, but for its convenience. Of such, espe- 
cially of diplomatists, one has a right to expect wit 
and ingenuity to avoid the lie if they must comply 
with the form. Now, I had been present, a little 
before, in the country at a cattle-show dinner, 
which followed an agricultural discourse delivered 
by a farmer : the discourse, to say the truth, was 
bad ; and one of our village fathers gave at the 
dinner this toast : " The orator of the day : his 
subject deserves the attention of every farmer." 
The caution of the toast did honor to our village 
father. I wish great lords and diplomatists had as 
much respect for truth. 



THE Sf'PERLA'nVE. 9 

But whilst thus evei^thing recommends simplic- 
ity and temperance of action; the utmost direct- 
ness, the positive degree, we mean thereby that 
" rightly to be great is not to stir without great ar- 
gument." Whenever the true objects of action ap- 
pear, they are to be heartily sought. Enthusiasm 
is the height of man ; it is the passing from the 
human to the divine. 

The superlative is as good as the positive, if it be 
alive. If man loves the conditioned, he also loves 
the imconditioned. We don't wish to sin on the 
other side, and to be purists, nor to check the in- 
vention of wit or the sally of humor. 'T is very 
different, this weak and wearisome lie, from the 
stimulus to the fancy which is given by a romanc- 
ing talker who does not mean to be exactly taken, 
— like the gallant skipper who complained to his 
owners that he had pumped the Atlantic Ocean 
three times through his ship on the passage, and 
't was common to strike seals and porpoises in the 
hold. Or what was similarly asserted of the late 
Lord Jeffrey, at the Scottish bar, — an attentive 
auditor declaring on one occasion after an argu- 
ment of three hours, that he had spoken the whole 
English language three times over in his speech. 

The objection to unmeasured speech is its lie. 
All men like an impressive fact. The astronomer 
shows you in his telescope the nebula of Orion, that 



10 THE SUPERLATTVE. 

you may look on that which is esteemed the far- 
thest-off land in visible nature. At the Bank of 
England they put a scrajJ of paper that is worth a 
million pounds sterling into the hands of the vis- 
itor to touch. Our travelling is a sort of search for 
the superlatives or summits of art, — much more 
the real wonders of power in the human forme 
The arithmetic of Newton, the memory of Maglia« 
becchi or Mirandola, the versatility of Jidius Caesar, 
the concentration of Bonaparte, the inspiration of 
Shakspeare, are sure of commanding interest and 
awe in every company of men. 

The superlative is the excess of expression. We 
are a garrulous, demonstrative kind of creatures, 
and cannot live without much outlet for all our 
sense and nonsense. And fit expression is so rare 
that mankind have a superstitious value for it, and 
it would seem the whole human race agree to value 
a man precisely in proportion to his power of ex- 
pression ; and to the most expressive man that has 
existed, namely, Shakspeare, they have awarded the 
highest place. 

The expressors are the gods of the world, but 
the men whom these expressors revere are the solid, 
balanced, undemonstrative citizens who make the 
reserved guard, the central sense, of the world. 
For the luminous object wastes itself by its shining, 
— is luminous because it is burning uj) : and if the 



THE SUPERLATIVE. 11 

powers are disposed for display, there is all the less 
left for use and creation. The talent sucks the 
substance of the man. Superlatives must be bought 
by too many positives. Gardens of roses must be 
stripped to make a few drops of otto. And these 
raptures of fire and frost, which indeed cleanse 
pedantry oat of conversation and make the speech 
salt and biting, would cost me the days of "well- 
being which are now so cheap to me, yet so valued. 
I like no deep stakes. I am a coward at gambling. 
I will bask in the common sun a while longer. 

Children and thoughtless people like exagger- 
ated event and activity ; like to run to a house on 
fire, to a fight, to an execution ; like to talk of a 
marriage, of a bankruptcy, of a debt, of a crime. 
The wise man shuns all this. I knew a grave man 
who, being urged to go to a church where a clergy- 
man was newly ordained, said " he liked him very 
well, but he would go when the interesting Sundays 
were over." 

All rests at last on the simplicity of nature, or 
real being. Nothing is for the most part less es- 
teemed. We are fond of dress, of ornament, of 
accomplishments, of talents, but distrustful of 
health, of soundness, of pure innocence. Yet na- 
ture measures her greatness by what she can spare, 
by what remains when all superfluity and accesso- 
ries are .shorn otf. 



12 THE SUPERLATIVE. 

Nor is there in nature itself any swell, any brag, 
any strain or shock, but a firm common sense 
through all her elephants and lions, through all 
her ducks and geese ; a true proportion between 
her means and her performance. Semjjer sibi sim- 
His. You shall not catch her in any anomalies,^ 
nor swaggering into any monsters. In all the years 
that I have sat in town and forest, I never saw a 
winged dragon, a flying man, or a talking fish, but 
ever the strictest regard to rule, and an absence of 
all surprises. No ; nature encourages no looseness, 
pardons no errors ; freezes punctually at 32°, boils 
punctually at 212° ; crystallizes in water at one in- 
variable angle, in diamond at one, in granite at 
one ; and if you omit the smallest condition the ex- 
periment will not succeed. Her communication 
obeys the gospel rule, yea or nay. She never ex- 
patiates, never goes into the reasons. Plant beech- 
mast and it comes up, or it does not come up. Sow 
grain, and it does not come up : put lime into the 
soil and try again, and this time she says yea. To 
every question an abstemious but absolute rej^ly. 
The like staidness is in her dealings with us. Na- 
ture is always serious, — does not jest with us. 
Where we have begun in folly, we are brought 
quickly to plain dealing. Life could not be car- 
ried on except by fidelity and good earnest ; and 
she brings the most heartless trifler to determined 



THE SUPERLATIVE. 13 

purpose presently. The men whom she admits to 
her confidence, the simple and great characters, are 
uniformly marked by absence of pretension and by 
understatement. The old and the modern sages of 
clearest insight are plain men, who have held them 
selves hard to the poverty of nature. 

The firmest and noblest ground on which people 
can live is truth ; the real with the real ; a ground 
on which nothing is assumed, but where they speak 
and think and do what they must, because they are 
so and not otherwise. 

But whilst the basis of character must be sim= 
plicity, the expression of character, it must be re- 
membered, is, in great degree, a matter of climate. 
In the temperate climates there is a temperate 
speech, in torrid clmiates an ardent one. Whilst 
in Western nations the superlative in conversation 
is tedious and weak, and in character is a capital 
defect, nature delights in showing us that in the 
East it is animated, it is pertinent, pleasing, poetic. 
Whilst she appoints us to keep within the sharp 
boundaries of form as the condition of our strength, 
she creates in the East the uncontrollable yearning 
to escape from limitation into the vast and bound- 
less ; to use a freedom of fancy which plays with 
all the works of nature, great or minute, galaxy or 
grain of dust, as toys and words of the mind ; in- 
culcates the tenet of a beatitude to be found in es- 



14 THE SUPERLATIVE. 

cape from all organization and all personality, and 
makes ecstasy an institution. 

Religion and poetry are all the civilization of the 
Arab. ''The ground of Paradise," said Moham- 
med, " is extensive, and the plants of it are hallelu- 
jahs." Religion and poetry : the religion teaches 
an inexorable destiny; it distinguishes only two 
days in each man's history, the day of his lot, and 
the day of judgment. The religion runs into ascet- 
icism and fate. The costume, the articles in which 
wealth is displayed, are in the same extremes. 
Thus the diamond and the pearl, which are only 
accidental and secondary in their use and value to 
us, are proper to the oriental world. The diver 
dives a beggar and rises with the price of a king- 
dom in his hand. A bag of sequins, a jewel, a bal- 
sam, a single horse, constitute an estate in coun- 
tries where insecure institutions make every one 
desirous of concealable and convertible property. 
Shall I say, further, that the orientals excel in 
costly arts, in the cutting of precious stones, in 
working in gold, in weaving on hand-looms costly 
stuffs from silk and wool, in spices, in dyes and 
drugs, henna, otto and camphor, and in the train- 
ing of slaves, elephants and camels, — things which 
are the poetry and superlative of commerce. 

On the other hand, — and it is a good illustra- 
tion of the difference of genius, — the European 



THE SUPERLATIVE. 15 

nations, and, in general, all nations in proportion 
to their civilization, understand the manufacture of 
iron. One of the meters of the height to which 
any civility rose is the skill in the fabric of iron. 
Universally, the better gold, the worse man. The 
political economist defies us to show any gold-mine 
country that is traversed by good roads : or a shore 
where pearls are found on which good schools are 
erected. The European civility, or that of the 
positive degree, is established by coal-mines, by 
ventilation, by irrigation and every skill — in hav- 
ing water cheap and pure, by iron, by agriculture 
for bread-stuffs, and manufacture of coarse and 
family cloths. Our modern improvements have 
been in the invention of friction matches ; of India- 
rubber shoes ; of the famous two parallel bars of 
iron ; then of the air-chamber of Watt, and of the 
judicious tubing of the engine, by Stephenson, in 
order to the construction of locomotives. 

Meantime, Nature, who loves crosses and mix- 
tures, makes these two tendencies necessary each to 
the other, and delights to re-enforce each peculiar- 
ity by imparting the other. The Northern genius 
finds itself singularly refreshed and stimulated by 
the breadth and luxuriance of Eastern imagery and 
modes of thinking, which go to check the pedantry 
of our inventions and the excess of our detail. 
There is no writing which has more electric power 



16 THE SUPERLATIVE. 

to unbind and animate the torpid intellect than the 
bold Eastern muse. 

If it come back howe\ er to the question of final 
superiority, it is too plain that there is no question 
that the star of empire rolls West : that the warm 
sons of the Southeast have bent the neck under the 
yoke of the cold temperament and the exact under- 
standing of the Northwestern races. 



USES OV GREAT MEN. 



It is natural to believe in great men. If the 
companions of our childhood should turn out to be 
heroes, and their condition regal, it would not sur- 
prise us. All mythology opens with demigods, and 
the circumstance is high and poetic ; that is, their 
genius is paramount. In the legends of the Gau- 
tama, the first men ate the earth and found it deli- 
ciously sweet. 

Nature seems to exist for the excellent. The 
world is upheld by the veracity of good men : they 
make the earth wholesome. They who lived with 
them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet 
and tolerable only in our belief in such society ; 
and, actually or ideally, we manage to live with 
superiors. We call our children and our lands by 
their names. Their names are wrought into the 
verbs of language, their works and effigies are in 
our houses, and every circumstance of the day re- 
calls an anecdote of them. 

The search after the great man is the dream of 



18 USES OF GREAT MEN. 

youth and the most serious occupation of manhood. 
We travel into foreign parts to find his works, — 
if possible, to get a glimpse of him. But we are 
put off with fortune instead. You say, the Eng- 
lish are practical ; the Germans are hospitable ; in 
Valencia the climate is delicious ; and in the hills 
of the Sacramento there is gold for the gathering. 
Yes, but I do not travel to find comfortable, rich 
and hospitable people, or clear sky, or ingots that 
cost too much. But if there were any magnet that 
would point to the countries and houses where are 
the persons who are intrinsically rich and power- 
ful, I would sell all and buy it, and put myself on 
the road to-day. 

The race goes with us on their credit. The 
knowledge that in the city is a man who invented 
the railroad, raises the credit of all the citizens. 
But enormous populations, if they be beggars, are 
disgusting, like moving cheese, like hills of ants or 
of fleas, — the more, the worse. 

Our religion is the love and cherishing of these 
patrons. The gods of fable are the shining mo- 
ments of great men. We run all our vessels into 
one mould. Our colossal theologies of Judaism, 
Christism, Buddhism, Mahometism, are the neces- 
sary and structural action of the human mind. 
The student of history is like a man going into a 
warehouse to buy cloths or carpets. He fancies he 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 19 

has a new article. If he go to the factory, he shall 
find that his new stuff still repeats the scrolls and 
rosettes which are found on the interior walls of 
the pyramids of Thebes. Our theism is the purifi- 
cation of the human mind. Man can paint, or 
make, or think, nothing but man. He believes 
that the great material elements had their origin 
from his thought. And our philosophy finds one 
essence collected or distributed. 

If now we proceed to inquire into the kinds of 
service we derive from others, let us be warned of 
the danger of modern studies, and begin low 
enough. We nuist not contend against love, or 
deny the substantial existence of other people. I 
know not what would happen to us. We have so- 
cial strengths. Our affection towards others cre- 
ates a sort of vantage or purchase which nothing 
will supply. I can do that by another which I can- 
not do alone. I can say to you what I cannot first 
say to myself. Other men are lenses through 
which we read our own minds. Each man seeks 
those of different quality from his own, and such 
as are good of their kind ; that is, he seeks other 
men, and the other est. The stronger the nature, 
the more it is reactive. Let us have the quality 
pure. A little genius let us leave alone. A main 
difference betwixt men is, whether thev attend their 



20 USES OF GREAT MEN. 

own a-li'air or not. Man is that noble endogenous 
plant which grows, like the palm, from within out- 
ward. His own affair, though impossible to others, 
he can open with celerity and in sport. It is easy 
to sugar to be sweet and to nitre to be salt. We 
take a great deal of pains to waylay and entrap 
that which of itself will fall into our hands. I 
count him a great man who inhabits a higher 
sphere of thought, into which other men rise with 
labor and difficulty ; he has but to open his eyes to 
see things in a true light and in large relations, 
whilst they must make painful corrections and 
keep a vigilant eye on many sources of error. His 
service to us is of like sort. It costs a beautiful 
person no exertion to paint her image on our eyes ; 
yet how splendid is that benefit ! It costs no more 
for a wise soul to convey his quality to other men. 
And every one can do his best thing easiest. ""Peu 
de moyens^ heaucoup cVeffeV He is great who 
is what he is from nature, and who never reminds 
us of others. 

But he must be related to us, and our life receive 
from him some promise of explanation. I cannot 
tell what I would know ; but I have observed there 
are persons who, in their character and actions, an- 
swer questions which I have not skill to put. One 
man answers some question which none of his con- 
temporaries put, and is isolated. The past and 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 21 

passing religions and philosophies answer some 
other question. Certain men affect us as rich pos- 
sibilities, but helpless to themselves and to their 
times, — the sport perhaps of some instinct that 
rules in the air ; — they do not speak to our want. 
But the great are near ; we know them at sight. 
They satisfy expectation and fall into place. What 
is good is effective, generative ; makes for itself 
room, food and allies. A sound apple produces 
seed, — a hybrid does not. Is a man in his place, 
he is constructive, fertile, magnetic, inundating ar- 
mies with his purpose, which is thus executed. 
The river makes its, own shores, and each legiti- 
mate idea makes its own channels and welcome, — 
harvests for food, institutions for expression, weap- 
ons to fight with and disciples to explain it. The 
true artist has the planet for his pedestal ; the ad- 
venturer, after years of strife, has nothing broader 
than his own shoes. 

Our common discourse respects two kinds of 
use or service from superior men. Direct giving 
is agreeable to the early belief of men ; direct 
giving of material or metaphysical aid, as of health, 
eternal youth, fine senses, arts of healing, magical 
power and prophecy. The boy believes there is 
a teacher who can sell him wisdom. Churches 
believe in imputed merit. But, in strictness, we 
are not much cog-nizant of direct serving. Man is 



22 USES OF GREAT MEN. 

endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The 
aid we have from others is mechanical compared 
with the discoveries of nature in us. What is thus 
learned is delightful in the doing, and the effect 
remains. Right ethics are central and go from the 
soul outward. Gift is contrary to the law of the 
universe. Serving others is serving us. I must 
absolve me to myself. ' Mind thy affair,' says the 
spirit : — ^ coxcomb, would you meddle with the 
skies, or with other people ? ' Indirect service is 
left. Men have a pictorial or representative quality, 
and serve us in the intellect. Behmen and Sweden- 
borg saw that things were representative. Men 
are also representative; first, of things, and sec- 
ondly, of ideas. 

As plants convert the minerals into food for 
animals, so each man converts some raw material 
in nature to human use. The inventors of fire, 
electricity, magnetism, iron, lead, glass, linen, silk, 
cotton ; the makers of tools ; the inventor of deci- 
mal notation ; the geometer ; the engineer ; the 
musician, — severally make an easy way for all, 
through unknown and impossible confusions. Each 
man is by secret liking connected with some district 
of nature, whose agent and interpreter he is ; as 
Linnaeus, of plants ; Huber, of bees ; Fries, of 
lichens ; Van Mons, of pears ; Dalton, of atomic 
forms ; Euclid, of lines ; Newton, of fluxions. 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 23 

A man is a centre for nature, running out threads 
of relation through every thing, fluid and solid, 
material and elemental. The earth rolls ; every 
clod and stone comes to the meridian : so every 
organ, function, acid, crystal, grain of dust, has its 
relation to the brain. It waits long, but its turn 
comes. Each plant has its parasite, and each cre- 
ated thing its lover and poet. Justice has already 
been done to steam, to iron, to wood, to coal, to 
loadstone, to iodine, to corn and cotton ; but how 
few materials are yet used by our arts ! The mass 
of creatures and of qualities are still hid and expec- 
tant. It would seem as if each waited, like the 
enchanted princess in fairy tales, for a destined 
human deliverer. Each must be disenchanted and 
walk forth to the day in human shape. In the 
history of discovery, the ripe and latent truth seems 
to have fashioned a brain for itself. A magnet 
must be made man in some Gilbert, or Swedenborg, 
or Oersted, before the general mind can come to 
entei"tain its powers. 

If wo limit ourselves to the first advantages, 
a sober gi'ace adheres to the mineral and botanic 
kingdoms, which, in the highest moments, comes 
up as the charm of nature, — the glitter of the 
spar, the sureness of affinity, the veracity of angles. 
Light and darkness, heat and cold, hunger and 
food, sweet and sour, solid, liquid and gas, circle 



24 USES OF GREAT MEN. 

US round in a wreath of pleasures, and, by their 
agreeable quarrel, beguile the day of life. The 
eye repeats every day the first eulogy on things, — 
'' He saw that they were good." We know where 
to find them ; and these performers are relished all 
the more, after a little experience of the pretending 
races. We are entitled also to higher advantages. 
Something is wanting to science until it has been 
humanized. The table of logarithms is one thing, 
and its vital play in botany, music, optics and archi- 
tecture, another. There are advancements to num- 
bers, anatomy, architecture, astronomy, little sus- 
pected at first, when, by union with intellect and 
will, they ascend into the life and reappear in 
conversation, character and politics. 

But this comes later. We speak now only of 
our acquaintance with them in their own sphere 
and the way in which they seem to fascinate and 
draw to them some genius who occupies himself 
with one thing, all his life long. The possibility 
of interpretation lies in the identity of the observer 
with the observed. Each material thing has its 
celestial side ; has its translation, through humanity, 
into the spiritual and necessary sphere where it 
plays a part as indestructible as any other. And 
to these, their ends, all things continually ascend. 
The gases gather to the solid firmament : the 
chemic lump arrives at the plant, and grows; 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 25 

arrives at the quadruped, and walks ; • arrives at 
the man, and thinks. But also the constituency 
determines the vote of the representative. He is 
not only representative, but participant. Like can 
only be known by like. The reason why he knows 
about them is that he is of them ; he has just come 
out of nature, or from being a part of that thing. 
Animated chlorine knows of chlorine, and incarnate 
zinc, of zinc. Their quality makes his career ; and 
he can variously publish their virtues, because they 
compose him. Man, made of the dust of the world, 
does not forget his origin ; and all that is yet inan- 
imate will one day speak and reason. Unpublished 
nature will have its whole secret told. Shall we 
say that quartz mountains will pulverize into innu- 
merable Werners, Von Buchs and Beaumonts, and 
the laboratory of the atmosphere holds in solution 
I know not what Berzeliuses and Davys ? 

Thus we sit by the fire and take hold on the 
poles of the earth. This quasi omnipresence sup- 
plies the imbecility of our condition. In one of 
those celestial days when heaven and earth meet 
and adorn each other, it seems a poverty that we 
can only spend it ouce : we wish for a thousand 
heads, a thousand bodies, that we might celebrate 
its immense beauty in many ways and places. Is 
this fancy ? Well, in good faith, we are multiplied 
by our proxies. How easily we adopt their labors I 



26 USES OF GREAT MEN. 

Every ship that comes to America got its chart 
from Columbus. Every novel is a debtor to Ho- 
mer. Every carpenter who shaves with a fore- 
plane borrows the genius of a forgotten inventorc 
Life is girt all round with a zodiac of sciences, the 
contributions of men who have perished to add 
their point of light to our sky. Engineer, broker, 
jurist, physician, moralist, theologian, and every 
man, inasmuch as he has any science, — is a definer 
and map-maker of the latitudes and longitudes of 
our condition. These road-makers on every hand 
enrich us. We must extend the area of life and 
multiply our relations. We are as much gainers 
by finding a new property in the old earth as by 
acquiring a new planet. 

We are too passive in the reception of these ma- 
terial or semi-material aids. We must not be sacks 
and stomachs. To ascend one step, — we are bet- 
ter served through our sympathy. Activity is con- 
tagious. Looking where others look, and convers- 
ing with the same things, we catch the charm which 
lured them. Napoleon said, " You must not fight 
too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all 
your art of war." Talk much with any man of 
vigorous mind, and we acquire very fast the habit 
of looking at things in the same light, and on each 
occurrence we anticipate his thought. 

Men are helpful through the intellect and the 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 27 

affections. Other help I find a false appearance. 
If you affect to give me bread and fire, I perceive 
that I pay for it the full price, and at last it leaves 
me as it found me, neither better nor worse : but 
all mental and moral force is a j^ositive good. It 
goes out from you, whether you will or not, and 
profits me whom you never thought of. I cannot 
even hear of personal vigor of any kind, great 
power of performance, without fresh resolution. 
We are emulous of all that man can do. Cecil's 
saying of Sir Walter Raleigh, "I know that he 
can toil terribly," is an electric touch. So are 
Clarendon's portraits, — of Hampden, " who was 
of an industry and vigilance not to be tired out or 
wearied by the most laborious, and of parts not to 
be imposed on by the most subtle and sharp, and 
of a personal courage equal to his best parts ; " — 
of Falkland, " who was so severe an adorer of 
truth, that he could as easily have given himself 
leave to steal, as to dissemble." We cannot read 
Plutarch without a tingling of the blood ; and I 
accept the saying of the Chinese Mencius : '^ A sage 
is the instructor of a hundred ages. When the 
manners of Loo are heard of, the stupid become in- 
telligent, and the wavering, determined." 

This is the moral of biography; yet it is hard 
for departed men to touch the quick like our own 
companions, whose names may not last as long. 



28 USES OF GREAT MEN. 

What is he whom I never thmk of? Whilst in 
every solitude are those who succor our genius and 
stimulate us in wonderful manners. There is a 
power in love to divine another's destiny better 
than that other can, and, by heroic encouragements, 
hold him to his task. What has friendship so sig- 
nal as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue is 
in us ? We will never more think cheaply of our- 
selves, or of life. We are piqued to some purpose, 
and the industry of the diggers on the railroad will 
not again shame us. 

Under this head too falls that homage, very pure 
as I think, which all ranks pay to the hero of the 
day, from Coriolanus and Gracchus down to Pitt, 
Lafayette, Wellington, Webster, Lamartine. Hear 
the shouts in the street ! The people cannot see him 
enough. They delight in a man. Here is a head 
and a trunk ! What a front ! what eyes ! Atlan- 
tean shoulders, and the whole carriage heroic, with 
equal inward force to guide the great machine ! 
This pleasure of full expression to that which, in 
their private experience is usually cramped and 
obstructed, runs also much higher, and is the se- 
cret of the reader's joy in literary genius. Nothing 
is kept back. There is fire enough to fuse the 
mountain of ore. Shakspeare's principal merit 
may be conveyed in saying that he of all men best 
understands the English language, and can say 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 29 

what he will. Yet these unchokecl channels and 
floodgates of expression are only health or fortu- 
nate constitution. Shaksj)eare's name suggests 
other and purely intellectual benefits. 

Senates and sovereigns have no compliment, with 
their medals, swords and armorial coats, like the 
addressing to a human being thoughts out of a 
certain height, and presupposing his intelligence. 
This honor, which is possible in personal intercourse 
scarcely twice in a lifetime, genius perpetually 
pays ; contented if now and then in a century the 
proffer is accepted. The indicators of the values of 
matter are degraded to a sort of cooks and con- 
fectioners, on the appearance of the indicators of 
ideas. Genius is the naturalist or geographer of 
the supersensible regions, and draws their map ; 
and, by acquainting us with new fields of activity, 
cools our affection for the old. These are at once 
accepted as the reality, of which the world we have 
conversed with is the show. 

We go to the gymnasium and the swimming- 
school to see the power and beauty of the body ; 
there is the like pleasure and a higher benefit from 
witnessing intellectual feats of all kinds ; as feats 
of memory, of mathematical combination, great 
power of abstraction, the transmutings of the imag- 
ination, even versatility and concentration, — as 
these acts expose the invisible organs and members 



30 USES OF GREAT MEN. 

of the mind, which respond, member for member, 
to the parts of the body. For we thus enter a new 
gymnasium, and learn to choose men by their truest 
marks, taught, with Plato, " to choose those who 
can, without aid from the eyes or any other sense, 
proceed to truth and to being." Foremost among 
these activities are the summersaults, spells and 
resurrections wrought by the imagination. When 
this wakes, a man seems to multiply ten times or 
a thousand times his force. It opens the delicious 
sense of indeterminate size and inspires an auda- 
cious mental habit. We are as elastic as the gas 
of gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a word 
dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and 
instantly our heads are bathed with galaxies, and 
our feet tread the floor of the Pit. And this bene- 
fit is real because we are entitled to these enlarge- 
ments, and once having passed the bounds shall 
never again be quite the miserable pedants we were. 
The high functions of the intellect are so allied 
that some imaginative power usually appears in 
all eminent minds, even in arithmeticians of the 
first class, but especially in meditative men of an 
intuitive habit of thought. This class serve us, so 
that they have the perception of identity and the 
perception of reaction. The eyes of Plato, Shak- 
speare, Swedenborg, Goethe, never shut on either 
of these laws. The perception of these laws is a 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 31 

kind of metre of the mind. Little minds are little 
through failure to see them. 

Even these feasts have their surfeit. Our de- 
light in reason degenerates into idolatry of the 
herald. Especially when a mind of powerful 
method has instructed men, we find the examples 
of oppression. The dominion of Aristotle, the 
Ptolemaic astronomy, the credit of Luther, of Bar 
con, of Locke ; — in religion the history of hie- 
rarchies, of saints, and the sects which have taken 
the name of each founder, are in point. Alas! 
every man is such a victim. The imbecility of men 
is always inviting the impudence of power. It is 
the delight of vulgar talent to dazzle and to blind 
the beholder. But true genius seeks to defend us 
from itself. True genius will not impoverish, but 
will liberate, and add new senses. If a wise man 
should appear in our village he would create, in 
those who conversed with him, a new consciousness 
of wealth, by opening their eyes to unobserved ad- 
vantages ; he would establish a sense of immovable 
equality, calm us with assurances that we could not 
be cheated ; as every one would discern the checks 
and guaranties of condition. The rich would see 
their mistakes and poverty, the poor their escapes 
and their resources. 

But nature brings all this about in due time. 
Rotation is her remedy. The soul is impatient of 



32 USES OF GREAT MEN. 

masters and eager for change. Housekeepers say 
of a domestic who has been valuable, " She had 
lived with me long enough." We are tendencies, 
or rather, symptoms, and none of us complete. We 
touch and go, and sip the foam of many lives. Ro- 
tation is the law of nature. When nature removes 
a great man, people explore the horizon for a suc- 
cessor ; but none comes, and none will. His class 
is extinguished with him. In some other and quite 
different field the next man will appear ; not Jef- 
ferson, not Franklin, but now a great salesman, 
then a road-contractor, then a student of fishes, 
then a buffalo-hunting explorer, or a semi-savage 
Western general. Thus we make a stand against 
our rougher masters ; but against the best there is 
a finer remedy. The power which they communi- 
cate is not theirs. When we are exalted by ideas, 
we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to 
which also Plato was debtor. 

I must not forget that we have a special debt 
to a single class. Life is a scale of degrees. 
Between rank and rank of our great men are 
wide intervals. Mankind have in all ages attached 
themselves to a few persons who either by the 
quality of that idea they embodied or by the large- 
ness of their reception were entitled to the posi- 
tion of leaders and law-givers. These teach us the 
qualities of primary nature, — admit us to the con- 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 33 

stitution of things. We swim, clay by day, on a 
river of delusions and are effectually amused with 
houses and towns in the air, of which the men 
about us are dupes. But life is a sincerity. In 
lucid intervals we say, ' Let there be an entrance 
opened for me into realities ; I have worn the fool's 
cap too long.' We will know the meaning of our 
economies and politics. Give us the cipher, and 
if persons and things are scores of a celestial music, 
let us read off the strains. We have been cheated 
of our reason ; yet there have been sane men, who 
enjoyed a rich and related existence. What they 
know, they know for us. With each new mind, 
a new secret of nature transpires; nor can the 
Bible be closed until the last great man is born. 
These men correct the delirium of the animal 
spirits, make us considerate and engage us to 
new aims and powers. The veneration of man- 
kind selects these for the highest place. Witness 
the multitude of statues, pictures aiid memorials 
v/hich recall their genius in every city, village, 
house and ship : — 

" Ever their phantoms arise before us, 
Our loftier brothers, but one in blood; 
At bed and table they lord it o'er us 
With looks of beauty and words of good." 

How to illustrate the distinctive benefit of ideas, 
the service rendered by^those who introduce moral 



34 USES OF GREAT MEN. 

truths into the general mind ? — I am plagued, 
in all my living, with a perpetual tariff of prices. 
If I work in my garden and prune an apple-tree, 
I am well enough entertained, and could continue 
indefinitely in the like occupation. But it comes 
to mind that a day is gone, and I have got this 
precious nothing done. I go to Boston or New 
York and run up and down on my affairs : they 
are sped, but so is the day. I am vexed by the 
recollection of this price I have paid for a trifling 
advantage. I remember the peau cVdne on which 
whoso sat should have his desire, but a piece of 
the skin was gone for every wish. I go to a con- 
vention of philanthropists. Do what I can, I 
cannot keep my eyes off the clock. But if there 
should appear in the company some gentle soul 
who knows little of persons or parties, of Caro- 
lina or Cuba, but who announces a law that dis- 
poses these particulars, and so certifies me of 
the equity \^hich checkmates every false player, 
bankrupts every self-seeker, and apprises me of 
my independence on any conditions of country, 
or time, or human body, — that man liberates me ; 
I forget the clock. I pass out of the sore relation 
to persons. I am healed of my hurts. I am 
made immortal by apprehending my possession 
of incorruptible goods. Here is great competition 
of rich and poor. We live in a market, where 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 35 

is only so much wheat, or wool, or land : and if 
I have so much more, every other must have so 
much less. I seem to have no good without 
breach of good manners. Nobody is glad in the 
gladness of another, and our system is one of 
war, of an injurious superiority. Every child of 
the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It 
is our system ; and a man comes to measure his 
greatness by the regrets, envies and hatreds of his 
competitors. But in these new fields there is room : 
here 'are no self-esteems, no exclusions. 

I admire great men of all classes, those who 
stand for facts, and for thoughts ; I like rough and 
smooth, " Scourges of God," and " Darlings of the 
hmnan race." I like the first Caesar ; and Charles 
v., of Spain; and Charles XII., of Sweden; Rich- 
ard Plantagenet ; and Bonaparte, in FrancCo I 
applaud a sufficient man, an officer equal to his 
office ; captains, ministers, senators. I like a master 
standing firm on legs of iron, well-born, rich, hand- 
some, eloquent, loaded with advantages, drawing all 
men by fascination into tributaries and supporters 
of his power. Sword and ctaff, or talents sword- 
like or staff-like, carry on the work of the world. 
But I find him greater when he can abolish himself 
and all heroes, by letting in this element of reason, 
irrespective of persons, this subtilizer and irresist- 
ible upward force, into our thought, destroying in- 



36 USES OF GREAT MEN. 

dividualism ; the power so great that the potentate 
is nothing. Then he is a monarch who gives a con- 
stitution to his people ; a pontiff who preaches the 
equality of souls and releases his servants from 
their barbarous homages; an emperor who can 
spare his empire. 

But I intended to specify, with a little minute- 
ness, two or three points of service. Nature never 
spares the opium or nepenthe, but wherever she 
mars her creature with some deformity or defect, 
lays her poppies plentifully on the bruise, and the 
sufferer goes joyfully through life, ignorant of the 
ruin and incapable of seeing it, though all the 
world point their finger at it every day. The 
worthless and offensive members of society, whose 
existence is a social pest, invariably think them- 
selves the most ill-used people alive, and never get 
over their astonishment at the ingratitude and 
selfishness of their contemporaries. Our globe 
discovers its hidden virtues, not only in heroes and 
archangels, but in gossips and nurses. Is it not 
a rare contrivance that lodged the due inertia in 
every creature, the conserving, resisting energy, 
the anger at being waked or changed ? Altogether 
independent of the intellectual force in each is the 
pride of opinion, the security that we are right. 
Not the feeblest grandame, not a mowing idiot, 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 37 

but uses what spark of perception and faculty is 
left, to chuckle and triumph in his or her opinion 
over the absurdities of all the rest. Difference 
from me is the measure of absurdity. Not one 
has a misgiving of being wrong. Was it not a 
bright thought that made things cohere with this 
bitumen, fastest of cements? But, in the midst 
of this chuckle of self-gratulation, some figure 
goes by which Thersites too can love and admire. 
This is he that should marshall us the way we 
were going. There is no end to his aid. With- 
out Plato we should almost lose our faith in the 
possibility of a reasonable book. We seem to 
want but one, but we want one. We love to 
associate with heroic persons, since our receptivity 
is unlimited ; and, with the great, our thoughts 
and manners easily become great. We are all 
wise in capacity, though so few in energy. There 
needs but one wise man in a company and all are 
wise, so rapid is the contagion. 

Great men are thus a coUyrium to clear our eyes 
from egotism and enable us to see other people and 
their works. But there are vices and follies inci- 
dent to whole populations and ages. Men resem- 
ble their contemporaries even more than their pro- 
genitors. It is observed in old couples, or in per- 
sons who have been housemates for a course of 
years, that they grow like, and if they should live 



38 USES OF GREAT MEN. 

long enough we should not be able to laiow them 
apart. Nature abhors these complaisances which 
threaten to melt the world into a lump, and has- 
tens to break up such maudlin agglutinationSc The 
like assimilation goes on between men of one town, 
of one sect, of one political party ; and the ideas of 
the time are in the air, and infect all who breathe 
it. Viewed from any high point, this city of New 
York, yonder city of London, the Western civilizar 
tion, would seem a bundle of insanities. We keep 
each other in countenance and exasperate by emu- 
lation the frenzy of the time. The shield against 
the stingings of conscience is the universal practice, 
or our contemporaries. Again, it is very easy to 
be as wise and good as your companions. We 
learn of our contemporaries what they know with- 
out effort, and almost through the pores of the 
skin. We catch it by sympathy, or as a wife ar- 
rives at the intellectual and moral elevations of her 
husband. But we stop where they stop. Very 
hardly can we take another step. The great, or 
such as hold of nature and transcend fashions by 
their fidelity to universal ideas, are saviors from 
these federal errors, and defend us from our con- 
temporaries. They are the exceptions which we 
want, where all grows like. A foreign greatness is 
the antidote for cabalisra. 

Thus we feed on genius, and refresh ourselves 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 39 

from too much conversation with our mates, and ex- 
ult in the depth of nature in that direction in which 
he leads us. What indemnificatipn is one great 
man for populations of pigmies ! Every mother 
wishes one son a genius, though all the rest should 
be mediocre. But a new danger appears in the ex- 
cess of influence of the gi'eat man. His attractions 
warp us from our place. We have become under- 
lings and intellectual suicides. Ah ! yonder in the 
horizon is our help ; — other great men, new quali- 
ties, counterweights and checks on each other. We 
cloy of the honey of each peculiar greatness. Ev- 
ery hero becomes a bore at last. Perhaps Voltaire 
was not bad-hearted, yet he said of the good Jesus, 
even, " I pray you, let me never hear that man's 
name again." They cry up the virtues of George 
Washington, — " Damn George Washington ! " is 
the poor Jacobin's whole speech and confutation. 
But it is human nature's indispensable defence. 
The centripetence augments the centrifugence. 
We balance one man with his opposite, and the 
health of the state depends on the see-saw. 

There is however a speedy limit to the use of 
heroes. Every genius is defended from approach 
by quantities of unavailableness. They are very 
attractive, and seem at a distance our own : but we 
are hindered on all sides from approach. The 
more we are drawn, the more we are repelled. 



40 USES OF GREAT MEN. 

There is something not solid in the good that is 
done for us. The best discovery the discoverer 
makes for himself. It has something unreal for 
his companion until he too has substantiated it. 
It seems as if the Deity dressed each soul which he 
sends into nature in certain virtues and powers not 
communicable to other men, and sending it to per- 
form one more turn through the circle of beings, 
wrote " JV^ot transferable " and " Good for this trip 
only,^^ on these garments of the soul. There is 
somewhat deceptive about the intercourse of minds. 
The boundaries are invisible, but they are never 
crossed. There is such good will to impart, and 
such good will to receive, that each threatens to 
become the other ; but the law of individuality col- 
lects its secret strength : you are you, and I am I, 
and so v/e remain. 

For nature wishes every thing to remain itself ; 
and whilst every individual strives to grow and ex- 
clude and to exclude and grow, to the extremities 
of the universe, and to impose the law of its being 
on every other creature. Nature steadily aims to 
protect each against every other. Each is self- 
defended. Nothing is more marked than the 
power by which individuals are guarded from indi- 
viduals, in a world where every benefactor becomes 
so easily a malefactor only by continuation of his 
activity into places where it is not due ; where chil- 



(7SES OF GREAT MEN. 41 

dren seem so much at the mercy of their foolish 
parents, and where ahnost all men are too social 
and interfering. We rightly speak of the guar- 
dian angels of children. How superior in their se- 
curity from infusions of evil persons, from vulgar- 
ity and second thought ! They shed their own 
abundant beauty on the objects they behold. 
Therefore they are not at the mercy of such poor 
educators as we adults. If we huff and chide them 
they soon come not to mind it and get a self-reli- 
ance ; and if we indulge them to folly, they learn 
the limitation elsewhere. 

We need not fear excessive influence. A more 
generous trust is permitted. Serve the great. 
Stick at no humiliation. Grudge no office thou 
canst render. Be the limb of their body, the 
breath of their mouth. Compromise thy egotism. 
Who cares for that, so thou gain aught wider and 
nobler ? Never mind the taunt of Boswellism : the 
devotion may easily be greater than the wretched 
pride which is guarding its own skirts. Be an- 
other : not thyself, but a Platonist ; not a soul, but 
a Christian ; not a naturalist, but a Cartesian ; not 
a poet, but a Shaksperian. In vain, the wheels of 
tendency \vill not stoj), nor will all the forces of in- 
ertia, fear, or of love itself hold thee there. On, 
and forever onward ! The microscope observes a 
monad or wheel-insect among the infusories circu- 



42 USES OF GREAT MEN. 

lating in water. Presently a clot appears on the 
animal, which enlarges to a slit, and it becomes 
two perfect animals. The ever-proceeding detach- 
ment appears not less in all thought and in society. 
Children think they cannot live without their par- 
ents. But, long before they are aware of it, the 
black dot has appeared and the detachment taken 
place. Any accident will now reveal to them their 
independence. 

But great men : — the word is injurious. Is 
there caste ? is there fate ? What becomes of the 
promise to virtue ? The thoughtful youth laments 
the superfoetation of nature. ' Generous and hand- 
some,' he says, ' is your hero ; but look at yonder 
poor Paddy, whose country is his wheelbarrow ; 
look at his whole nation of Paddies.' Why are 
the masses, from the dawn of history down, food 
for knives and powder? The idea dignifies a few 
leaders, who have sentiment, opinion, love, self-de- 
votion ; and they make war and death sacred ; — 
but what for the wretches whom they hire and 
kill? The cheapness of man is every day's trag- 
edy. It is as real a loss that others should be 
low as that we should be low ; for we must have 
society. 

Is it a reply to these suggestions to say. Society 
is a Pestalozzian school : all are teachers and pu- 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 43 

pils in turn ? We are equally served by receiving 
and by imparting. Men who know the same things 
are not long the best company for each other. 
But bring to each an intelligent person of another 
experience, and it is as if you let off water from a 
lake by cutting a lower basin. It seems a mechan- 
ical advantage, and great benefit it is to each 
speaker, as he can now paint out his thought to 
himself. We pass very fast, in our personal 
moods, from dignity to dependence. And if any 
appear never to assume the chair, but always to 
stand and serve, it is because we do not see the 
company in a sufficiently long period for the whole 
rotation of parts to come about. As to what we 
call the masses, and common men, — there are no 
common men. All men are at last of a size ; and 
true art is only possible on the conviction that 
every talent has its apotheosis somewhere. Fair 
play and an open field and freshest laurels to all 
who have won them ! But heaven reserves an 
equal scope for every . creature. Each is uneasy 
until he has produced his private ray unto the con- 
cave sphere and beheld his talent also in its last 
nobility and exaltation. 

The heroes of the hour are relatively great ; of 
a faster gi-owth ; or they are such in whom, at the 
moment of success, a quality is ripe which is then 
in request. Other days will demand other quali- 



44 USES OF GREAT MEN. 

ties. Some rays escape the common observer, and 
want a finely adapted eye. Ask the great man if 
there be none greater. His companions are ; and 
not the less great but the more that society cannot 
see them. Nature never sends a great man into 
the planet without confiding the secret to another 
soul. 

One gracious fact emerges from these studies, — 
that there is true ascension in our love. The rep- 
utations of the nineteenth century will one day be 
quoted to prove its barbarism. The genius of hu- 
manity is the real subject whose biography is writ- 
ten in our annals. We must infer much, and sup- 
ply many chasms in the record. The history of 
the universe is symptomatic, and life is mnemoni- 
cal. No man, in all the procession of famous men, 
is reason or illumination or that essence we were 
looking for ; but is an exhibition, in some quarter, 
of new possibilities. Could we one day complete 
the immense figure which these flagrant points com- 
pose ! The study of many individuals leads us to 
an elemental region wherein the individual is lost, 
or wherein all touch by their summits. Thought 
and feeling that break out there cannot be i im- 
pounded by any fence of personality. This is the 
key to the power of the greatest men, — their spirit 
diffuses itself. A new quality of mind travels by 
night and by day, in concentric circles from its ori- 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 45 

gin, and publishes itself by unknown methods : the 
union of all minds appears intimate ; what gets ad- 
mission to one, cannot be kept out of any other ; the 
smallest acquisition of truth or of energy, in any 
quarter, is so much good to the commonwealth of 
souls. If the disparities of talent and position van- 
ish when the individuals are seen in the duration 
which is necessary to complete the career of each, 
even more swiftly the seeming injustice disappears 
when we ascend to the central identity of all the 
individuals, and know that they are made of the 
substance which ordaineth and doeth. 

The genius of humanity is the right point of 
view of history. The qualities abide; the men 
who exhibit them have now more, now less, and 
pass away ; the qualities remain on another brow. 
No experience is more familiar. Once you saw 
phoenixes : they are gone ; the world is not there- 
fore disenchanted. The vessels on which you read 
sacred emblems turn out to be common pottery ; 
but the sense of the pictures is sacred, and you 
may still read them transferred to the walls of the 
world. For a time our teachers serve us personally, 
as metres or milestones of progress. Once they 
were angels of knowledge and their figures touched 
the sky. Then we drew near, saw their means, 
culture and limits ; and they yielded their place 
to other geniuses. Happy, if a few names remain 



46 USES OF GREAT MEN. 

SO high that we have not been able to read them 
nearer, and age and comparison have not robbed 
them of a ray. But at last we shall cease to look in 
men for completeness, and shall content ourselves 
with their social and delegated quality. All that 
respects the individual is temporary and prospec- 
tive, like the individual himself, who is ascending 
out of his limits into a catholic existence. We 
have never come at the true and best benefit of any 
genius so long as we believe him an original force. 
In the moment when he ceases to help us as a 
cause, he begins to help us more as an effect. Then 
he appears as an exponent of a vaster mind and 
will. The opaque self becomes transparent with 
the light of the First Cause. 

Yet, within the limits of human education and 
agency, we may say great men exist that there may 
be greater men. The destiny of organized nature 
is amelioration, and who can tell its limits ? It is 
for man to tame the chaos ; on every side, whilst 
he lives, to scatter the seeds of science and of song, 
that climate, corn, animals, men, may be milder, 
and the germs of love and benefit may be multi- 
plied. 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 



Great men are more distinguished by range 
and extent than by originality. If we require the 
originality which consists in weaving, like a spi- 
der, their web from their own bowels ; in finding 
clay and making bricks and building the house ; no 
great men are original. Nor does valuable origi- 
nality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero 
is in the press of knights and the thick of events ; 
and seeing what men want and sharing their de- 
sire, he adds the needful length of sight and of 
arm, to come at the desired point. The greatest 
genius is the most indebted man. A poet is no 
rattle-brain, saying what comes uppermost, and, be- 
cause he says every thing, saying at last something 
good ; but a heart in unison with his time and 
country. There is nothing whimsical and fantas- 
tic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest, 
freighted with the weightiest convictions and point- 
ed with the most determined aim which any man 
or class knows of in his times. 



48 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. - 

The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, 
and will not have any individual great, except 
through the general. There is no choice to gen- 
ius. A great man does not wake up on some fine 
morning and say, ' I am full of life, I will go to 
sea and find an Antarctic continent : to-day I will 
square the circle : I will ransack botany and find 
a new food for man : I have a new architecture in 
my mind : I foresee a new mechanic power : ' no, 
but he finds himself in the river of the thoughts 
and events, forced onward by the ideas and neces- 
sities of his contemporaries. He stands where all 
the eyes of men look one way, and their hands all 
point in the direction in which he should go. The 
Church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, 
and he carries out the advice which her music gave 
him, and builds a cathedral needed by her chants 
and processions. He finds a war raging : it edu- 
cates him, by trumpet, in barracks, and he betters 
the instruction. He finds two counties groping to 
bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of pro- 
duction to the place of consumption, and he hits on 
a railroad. Every master has found his materials 
collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with 
his people and in his love of the materials he 
wrought in. What an economy of power ! and 
what a compensation for the shortness of life ! 
All is done to his hand. The world has brought 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 49 

him thus far on his way. The human race has 
(;^one out before him, sunk the hills, filled the hol- 
lows and bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets, 
artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he 
enters into their labors. Choose any other thing, 
out of the line of tendency, out of the national feel- 
ing and history, and he woidd have all to do for 
himself : his powei's would be expended in the first 
preparations. Great genial power, one would al- 
most say, consists in not being original at all ; in 
being altogether receptive ; in letting the world do 
all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass un- 
obstructed through the mind. 

Shakspeare's youth fell in a time when the Eng- 
lish people were importunate for dramatic enter- 
tainments. The court took offence easily at politi- 
cal allusions and attempted to suppress them. 
The Puritans, a growing and energetic party, and 
the religious among the Anglican church, would 
suppress them. But the people wanted them. 
Inn-yards, houses without roofs, and extempora- 
neous enclosures at country fairs were the ready 
theatres of strolling players. The people had 
tasted this new joy-; and, as we coidd not hope to 
suppress newspapers now, — no, not by the strong- 
est party, — neither then could king, prelate, or 
puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ which 
was ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lectui'e, Punch 



50 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 

and library, at the same time. Probably king, 
prelate and puritan, all found their own account in 
it. It had become, by all causes, a national inter- 
est, — by no means conspicuous, so that some great 
scholar would have thought of treating it in an 
English history, — but not a whit less considerable 
because it was cheap and of no account, like a 
baker's-shop. The best proof of its vitality is the 
crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this 
field; Kyd, Marlow, Greene, Jonson, Chapman, 
Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, 
Ford, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher. 

The secure possession, by the stage, of the pub- 
lic mind, is of the first importance to the poet who 
works for it. He loses no time in idle experiments. 
Here is audience and expectation prepared. In 
the case of Shakspeare there is much more. At 
the time when he left Stratford and went up to 
London, a great body of stage-plays of all dates 
and writers existed in manuscript and were in 
turn produced on the boards. Here is the Tale of 
Troy, which the audience will bear hearing some 
part of, every week ; the Death of Julius Caesar, 
and other stories out of Plutarch, which they never 
tire of ; a shelf full of English history, from the 
chronicles of Brut and Arthur, down to the royal 
Henries, which men hear eagerly ; and a string of 
doleful tragedies, merry Italian tales and Spanish 



SIIAKSPEARE: OR, THE POET. 51 

voyages, which all the London 'prentices know. 
All the mass has been treated, with more or less 
skill, by every playwright, and the prompter has the 
soiled and tattered manuscripts. It is now no 
longer possible to say who WTote them first. They 
have been the property of the Theatre so long, and 
so many rising geniuses have enlarged or altered 
them, inserting a speech or a whole scene, or add- 
ing a song, that no man can any longer claim copy- 
right in this work of numbers. Happily, no man 
wishes to. They are not yet desired in that way. 
We have few readers, many spectators and hearers. 
They had best lie where they are. 

Shakspeare, in common with his comrades, es- 
teemed the mass of old plays waste stock, in which 
any experiment could be freely tried. Had the 
prestige which hedges about a modern tragedy ex- 
isted, nothing could have been done. The rude 
warm blood of the living England circidated in the 
play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which 
he wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The 
poet needs a ground in popidar tradition on which 
he may work, and which, again, may restram his 
art within the due temperance. It holds him to 
the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice, 
and in furnishing so much work done to his hand, 
leaves him at leisure and in full strength for the 
audacities of his imagination In short, the poet 



52 SHAKSPEABE; OB, THE POET. 

owes to his legend what sculpture owed to the tem- 
ple. Sculpture in Egjrpt and in Greece grew up 
in subordination to architecture. It was the orna- 
ment of the temple wall : at first a rude relief 
carved on pediments, then the relief became bolder 
and a head or arm was projected from the wall ; 
the groups being still arranged with reference to 
the building, which serves also as a frame to hold 
the figures ; and when at last the greatest freedom 
of style and treatment was reached, the prevailing 
genius of architecture still enforced a certain calm- 
ness and continence in the statue. As soon as the 
statue was begun for itself, and with no reference 
to the temple or palace, the art began to decline : 
freak, extravagance and exhibition took the place 
of the old temperance. This balance-wheel, which 
the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irri- 
tability of poetic talent found in the accumulated 
dramatic materials to which the people were al- 
ready wonted, and which had a certain excellence 
which no single genius, however extraordinary, 
could hope to create. 

In point of fact it appears that Shakspcare did 
owe debts in all directions, and was able to use 
whatever he found; and the amount of indebted- 
ness may be inferred from Malone's laborious com- 
putations in regard to the First, Second and Third 
parts of Henry VI., in which, " out of 6,043 lines, 



SHAKSPEARE ; OR, THE POET. 53 

1,771 were written by some author preceding Shak- 
speare, 2,373 by him, on the foundation Laid by his 
predecessors, and 1,899 were entirely his own." 
And the proceeding investigation hardly leaves a 
single drama of his absolute invention. Malone's 
sentence is an important piece of external history. 
In Henry VIII. I think I see plainly the cropping 
out of the original rock on which his own finer 
stratum was laid. The first play was written by a 
superior, thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. I can 
mark his lines, and know weU their cadence. See 
Wolsey's soliloquy, and the following scene with 
Cromwell, wJiere instead of the metre of Shakspeare, 
whose secret is that the thought constructs the tune, 
so that reading for the sense will best bring out 
the rhythm, — here the lines are constructed on a 
given tune, and the verse has even a trace of pulpit 
eloquence. But the play contains through all its 
length unmistakable traits of Shakspeare's hand, 
and some passages, as the account of the coronation, 
are like autogi'aphs. What is odd, the compliment 
to Queen Elizabeth is in the bad rhythm. 

Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a better 
fable than any invention can. If he lost any credit 
of design, he augmented his resources; and, at 
that day, our petulant demand for originality was 
not so much pressed. There was no literature for 
the million. The universal reading, the cheap 



54 SHAKSPEAEE ; OR, THE POET. 

press, were unknown. A great poet who appears 
in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the 
light which is any where radiating. Every intel- 
lectual jewel, every flower of sentiment it is his fine 
office to bring to his people ; and he comes to value 
his memory equally with his invention. He is 
therefore little solicitous whence his thoughts have 
been derived ; whether through translation, whether 
through tradition, whether by travel in distant coun- 
tries, whether by inspiration ; from whatever source, 
they are equally welcome to his uncritical audience. 
Nay, he borrows very near home. Other men say 
wise things as well as he; only they say a good 
many foolish things, and do not know when they 
have spoken wisely. He knows the sparkle of the 
true stone, and puts it in high place, wherever he 
finds it. Such is the happy position of Homer per- 
haps ; of Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt that all wit 
was their wit. And they are librarians and his- 
toriographers, as well as poets. Each romancer was 
heir and dispenser of all the hundred tales of the 
world, — 

" Presenting Thebes' and Pelops' line 
And the tale of Troy divine." 

The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our 
early literature ; and more recently not only Pope 
and Dryden have been beholden to him, but, in the 
whole society of English writers, a large unacknowl- 



SHAKSPEARE ; OR, THE POET. 55 

edged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with 
the opulence which feeds so many pensioners. But 
Chaucer is a huge borrower. Chaucer, it seems, 
drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, 
from Guido di Colonna, whose Latin romance of 
the Trojan war was in turn a compilation from 
Dares Phrygius, Ovid and Statins. Then Petrarch, 
Boccaccio and the Provencal poets are his benefac- 
tors : the Romaunt of the Rose is only judicious 
translation from William of Lorris and John of 
Meung : Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius of Ur- 
bino : The Cock and the Fox, from the Lais of 
Marie : The House of Fame, from the French or 
Italian : and poor Gower he uses as if he were only 
a brick-kiln or stone-quarry out of which to build 
his house. He steals by this apology, — that what 
he takes has no worth where he finds it and the 
greatest where 'he leaves it. It has come to be 
practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man 
having once shown himself capable of original ^vrit- 
ing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writ- 
ings of others at discretion. Thought is the proper- 
ty of him who can entertain it and of him who can 
adequately place it. A certain awkwardness marks 
the use of borrowed thoughts ; but as soon as we 
have learned what to do with them they become our 
own. 

Thus all originality is relative. Every thinker is 



56 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 

retrospective. The learned member of the legisla- 
ture, at Westminster or at Washington, speaks and 
votes for thousands. Show us the constituency, and 
the now invisible channels by which the senator is 
made aware of their wishes ; the crowd of practical 
and knowing men, who, by correspondence or con- 
versation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes 
and estimates, and it will bereave his fine attitude 
and resistance of something of their impressiveness. 
As Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so 
Locke and Eousseau think, for thousands ; and so 
there were fountains all around Homer, Menu, 
Saadi, or Milton, from which they drew ; friends, 
lovers, books, traditions, proverbs, — all perished 
— which, if seen, would go to reduce the w^onder. 
Did the bard speak with authority ? Did he feel 
himself overmatched by any companion ? The ap- 
peal is to the consciousness of the writer. Is there 
at last in his breast a Delphi whereof to ask con- 
cerning any thought or thing, whether it be verily 
so, yea or nay? and to have answer, and to rely on 
that ? All the debts which such a man could con- 
tract to other wit would never disturb his conscious- 
ness of originality ; for the ministrations of books 
and of other minds are a whiff of smoke to that 
most private reality with which he has conversed. 

It is easy to see that what is best written or 
done by genius in the world, was no man's work, 



SHAKSPEARE ; OR, THE POET. 57 

but came by wide social labor, when a thousand 
wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our 
English Bible is a wonderful specimen of the 
strength and music of the English language. But 
it was not made by one man, or at one time ; but 
centuries and churches brought it to perfection. 
There never was a time when there was not some 
translation existing. The Liturgy, admired for its 
energy and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of 
ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and 
forms of the Catholic church, — these collected, 
too, in long periods, from the prayers and medita- 
tions of every saint and sacred writer all over the 
world. Grotius makes the like remark in respect 
to the Lord's Prayer, that the single clauses of 
which it is composed were already in use in the 
time of Christ, in the Rabbinical forms. He 
picked out the grains of gold. The nervous lan- 
guage of the Common Law, the impressive forms 
of our courts and the precision and substantial 
truth of the legal distinctions, are the contribution 
of all the sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who 
have lived in the countries where these laws gov- 
ern. The translation of Plutarch gets its excel- 
lence by being translation on .translation. There 
never was a time when there was none. All the 
truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and 
all others successively picked out and thrown away. 



58 'SHAKSPEARE ; OR, THE POET. 

Something like the same process had gone on, long 
before, with the originals of these books. The 
world takes liberties with world -books. Vedas, 
^sop's Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Ili- 
ad, Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the 
work of single men. In the composition of such 
works the time thinks, the market thinks, the ma- 
son, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, the 
fop, all think for us. Every book supplies its time 
with one good word ; every municipal law, every 
trade, every folly of the day ; and the generic cath- 
olic genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his 
originality to the originality of all, stands with the 
next age as the recorder and embodiment of his 
own. 

We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, 
and the Shakspeare Society, for ascertaining the 
steps of the English drama, from the Mysteries 
celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the 
final detachment from the church, and the comple- 
tion of secular plays, from Ferrex and Porrex, and 
Gammer Gurton's Needle, down to the possession 
of the stage by the very pieces which Shaks})eare 
altered, remodelled and finally made his own. 
Elated with success and piqued by the growing 
interest of the problem, they have left no book- 
stall unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, 
no file of old yellow accounts to decompose in 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 59 

damp and worms, so keen was the hope to dis- 
cover whether the boy Shakspeare poached or not, 
whether he hekl horses at the theatre door, whether 
he kept school, and why he left in his will only his 
second-best bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife. 

There is somewhat touching in the madness with 
which the passing age mischooses the object on 
which all candles shine and all eyes are turned ; 
the care with which it registers every trifle touch- 
ing Queen Elizabeth and King James, and the 
Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs and Buckinghams; 
and lets pass without a single valuable note the 
founder of another dynasty, which alone will cause 
the Tudor dynasty to be remembered, — the man 
who carries the Saxon race in him by the inspira- 
tion which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the 
foremost people of the world are now for some ages 
to be nourished, and minds to receive this and not 
another bias. A popular player ; — nobody sus- 
pected he was the poet of the human race ; and the 
secret was kept as faithfully from poets and intel- 
lectual men as from courtiers and frivolous people. 
Bacon, wlio took the inventory of the human un- 
derstanding for his times, never mentioned his 
name. Ben Jonson, though we have strained his 
few words of regard and panegyric, had no suspi- 
cion of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he 
was attempting. He no doubt thought the praise 



60 SHAKSPEARE ; OR, THE POET. 

he has conceded to him generous, and esteemed 
himself, out of all question, the better poet of the 
two. 

If it need wit to know wit, according to the prov- 
erb, Shakspeare's time should be capable of recog= 
nizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born four years 
after Shakspeare, and died twenty-three years after 
him ; and I find, among his correspondents and 
acquaintances, the following persons : Theodore 
Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, the 
Earl of Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, 
John Milton, Sir Henry Vane, Isaac Walton, Dr. 
Donne, Abraham Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles 
Cotton, John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Al- 
bericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Arminius ; with aU 
of whom exists some token of his having commu- 
nicated, without enumerating many others whom 
doubtless he saw, — Shakspeare, Spenser, Jonson, 
Beaumont, Massinger, the two Herberts, Marlow, 
Chapman and the rest. Since the constellation of 
great men who appeared in Greece in the time of 
Pericles, there was never any such society ; — yet 
their genius failed them to find out the best head 
in the universe. Our poet's mask was impenetra- 
ble. You cannot see the mountain near. It took 
a century to make it suspected ; and not until two 
centuries had passed, after his death, did any criti- 
cism which we think adequate begin to appear. It 



SHAKSPEARE ; OR, THE POET. 61 

was not possible to write the history of Shakspeare 
till now ; for he is the father of German literature : 
it was with the introduction of Shakspeare into 
German, by Lessing, and the translation of his 
works by Wieland and Schlegel, that the rapid 
burst of German literature was most intimately 
connected. It was not until the nineteenth cen- 
tury, whose speculative genius is a sort of living 
Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet could find 
such wondering readers. Now, literature, philoso- 
phy and thought, are Shakspearized. His mind 
is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do 
not see. Our ears are educated to music by his 
rhjrthm. Coleridge and Goethe are the only crit- 
ics who have expressed our convictions with any 
adequate fidelity : but there is in all cultivated 
minds a silent appreciation of his superlative power 
and beauty, which, like Christianity, qualifies the 
period. 

The Shakspeare Society have inquired in all di- 
rections, advertised the missing facts, offered money 
for any information that will lead to proof, — and 
with what result? Beside some important illustra- 
tion of the history of the English stage, to which I 
have adverted, they have gleaned a few facts 
touching the property, and dealings in regard to 
property, of the poet. It appears that from year 
to year he owned a larger share in the Biackfriars' 



62 SHAKSPEABE ; OR, THE POET. 

Theatre: its wardrobe and other appurtenances 
were his : that he bought an estate in his native vil- 
lage with his earnings as writer and shareholder ; 
that he lived in the best house in Stratford ; was 
intrusted by his neighbors with their commissions 
in London, as of borrowing money, and the like ; 
that he was a veritable farmer. About the time 
when he was writing Macbeth, he sues Philip Rog- 
ers, in the borough-coiirt of Stratford, for thirty- 
five shillings, ten pence, for corn delivered to him 
at different times ; and in all respects appears as a 
good husband, with no reputation for eccentricity 
or excess. He was a good-natured sort of man, 
an actor and shareholder in the theatre, not in any 
striking manner distinguished from other actors 
and managers. I admit the importance of this in- 
formation. It was well worth the pains that have 
been taken to procure it. 

But whatever scraps of information concerning 
his condition these researches may have rescued, 
they can shed no light upon that infinite invention 
which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for 
us. We are very clumsy writers of history. We 
tell the chronicle of parentage, birth, birth-place, 
schooling, school-mates, earning of money, mar- 
riage, publication of books, celebrity, death ; and 
when we have come to an end of this gossip, no 
ray of relation appears between it and the goddess- 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 63 

bom ; and it seems as if, had we dipped at random 
into the " Modern Plutarch," and read any other 
life there, it would have fitted the poems as well. 
It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rain- 
bow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to 
abolish the past and refuse all history. Malone, 
Warburton, Dyce and Collier, have wasted their oil. 
The famed theatres, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, 
the Park and Tremont have vainly assisted. Bet- 
terton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean and Macready ded- 
icate their lives to this genius ; him they crown, 
elucidate, obey and express. The genius knows 
them not. The recitation begins ; one golden word 
leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry 
and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own 
inaccessible homes. I remember I went once to 
see the Hamlet of a famed performer, the pride of 
the English stage ; and all I then heard and all I 
now remember of the tragedian was that in which 
the tragedian had no part ; simply Hamlet's ques- 
tion to the ghost : — 

" What may this mean, 
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel 
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon ? " 

That imagination which dilates the closet he writes 
in to the world's dimension, crowds it with agents 
in rank and order, as quickly reduces the big real- 
ity to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks 



64 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 

of his magic spoil for us the illusions of the green- 
room. Can any biography shed light on the local- 
ities into which the Midsummer Night's Dream ad- 
mits me ? Did Shakspeare confide to any notary 
or parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate in Strat- 
ford, the genesis of that delicate creation ? The 
forest of Arden, the nimble air of Scone Castle, 
the moonlight of Portia's villa, " the antres vast 
and desarts idle " of Othello's captivity, — where 
is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, the chancel- 
lor's file of accounts, or private letter, that has 
kept one word of those transcendent secrets ? In 
fine, in this drama, as in all great works of art, — 
in the Cyclopaean architecture of Egypt and India, 
in the Phidian sculpture, the Gothic minsters, the 
Italian painting, the Ballads of Spain and Scot- 
land, — the Genius draws up the ladder after him, 
when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives 
way to a new age, which sees the works and asks 
in vain for a history. 

Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shak- 
speare ; and even he can tell nothing, except to the 
Shakspeare in us, that is, to our most apprehen- 
sive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from 
off his tripod and give us anecdotes of his inspi- 
rations. Read the antique documents extricated, 
analyzed and compared by the assiduous Dyce 
and CoUier, and now read one of these skyey 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 65 

sentences, — aerolites, — which seem to have fallen 
out of heaven, and which not your experience but 
the man within the breast has accepted as words 
of fate, and tell me if they match ; if the former 
account in any manner for the latter ; or which 
gives the most historical insight into the man. 

Hence, though our external history is so meagre, 
yet, with Shakspeare for biographer, instead of 
Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the information 
which is material; that which describes character 
and fortune, that which, if we were about to meet 
the man and deal with him, would most import 
us to know. We have his recorded convictions 
on those questions which knock for answer at every 
heart, — on life and death, on love, on wealth and 
poverty, on the prizes of life and the ways whereby 
we come at them ; on the characters of men, and 
the influences, occult and open, which affect their 
fortunes ; and on thos'e mysterious and demoniacal 
powers which defy our science and which yet in- 
terweave their malice and their gift in our bright- 
est hours. Who ever read the volume of the 
Sonnets without finding that the poet had tliere 
revealed, under masks that are no masks to the 
intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love ; the 
confusion of sentiments in the most susceptible, 
and, at tlie same time, the most intellectual of 
men? What trait of his private mind has he 



QQ SHAKSPEARE ; OE, THE POET. 

hidden in his dramas? One can discern, in his 
ample pictures of the gentleman and the king, 
what forms and humanities pleased him ; his de- 
light in troops of friends, in large hospitality, in 
cheerful giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let 
Antonio the merchant answer for his great heart. 
So far from Shakspeare's being the least known, 
he is the one person, in all modern history, known 
to us. What point of morals, of manners, of 
economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of 
the conduct of life, has he not settled? What 
mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? 
What office, or function, or district of man's 
work, has he not remembered ? What king has 
he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon ? 
What maiden has not found him finer than her 
delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? 
What sage has he not outseen ? What gentleman 
has he not instructed in the rudeness of his be- 
havior ? 

Some able and appreciating critics think no 
criticism on Shakspeare valuable that does not 
rest purely on the dramatic merit ; that he is 
falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think 
as highly as these critics of his dramatic merit, 
but still think it secondary. He was a full man, 
who liked to talk ; a brain exhaling thoughts and 
images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next 



SHAKSPEARE ; OR, THE POET. 67 

at hand. Had he been less, we should have had 
to consider how well he filled his place, how good 
a dramatist he was, — and he is the best in the 
world. But it turns out that what he has to 
say is of that weight as to withdraw some attention 
from the vehicle ; and he is like some saint whose 
history is to be rendered into all languages, into 
verse and prose, into songs and pictures, and cut 
up into proverbs ; so that the occasion which gave 
the saint's meaning the form of a conversation, or 
of a prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial 
compared with the universality of its application. 
So it fares with the wise Shakspeare and his book 
of life. He wrote the airs for all our modern 
music : he wrote the text of modern life ; the text 
of manners: he drew the man of England and 
Europe ; the father of the man in America ; he 
drew the man, and described the day, and what is 
done in it : he read the hearts of men and women, 
their probity, and their second thought and wiles ; 
the wiles of innocence, and the transitions by 
which virtues and vices slide into their contraries : 
he could divide the mother's part from the father's 
part in the face of the child, or draw the fine 
demarcations of freedom and of fate: he knew 
the laws of repression which make the police of 
nature : and all the sweets and all the terrors of 
human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly 



68 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 

as the landscape lies on the eye. And the impor- 
tance of this wisdom of life sinks the form, as of 
Drama or Epic, out of notice. ' T is like making 
a question concerning the paper on which a king's 
message is written. 

Shakspeare is as much out of the category of 
eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. He 
is inconceivably wise ; the others, conceivably. A 
good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain 
and think from thence ; but not into Shakspeare's. 
We are still out of doors. For executive faculty, 
for creation, Shakspeare is unique. No man can 
imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of 
subtlety compatible with an individual self, — the 
subtilest of authors, and only just within the pos- 
sibility of authorship. With this wisdom of life 
is the equal endowment of imaginative and of 
lyric power. He clothed the creatures of his 
legend with form and sentiments as if they were 
people who had lived under his roof ; and few 
real men have left such distinct characters as these 
fictions. And they spoke in language as sweet 
as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him 
into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. 
An omnipresent humanity co-ordinates all his fac- 
ulties. Give a man of talents a story to tell, and 
his partiality will presently appear. He has cer- 
tain observations, opinions, topics, which have 



SHAKSPEARE ; OR, THE POET. 69 

some accidental prominence, and which he dis- 
poses all to exhibit. He crams this part and 
starves that other part, consulting not the fitness 
of the thing, but his fitness and strength. But 
Shakspeare has no pecidiarity, no importunate 
topic ; but all is duly given ; no veins, no curiosi- 
ties ; no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no manner- 
ist is he : he has no discoverable egotism : the 
great he tells greatly ; the small subordinately. 
He is wise without emphasis or assertion ; he is 
strong, as nature is strong, who lifts the land into 
mountain slopes without effort and by the same 
rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as 
well to do the one as the other. This makes that 
equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative and 
love-songs ; a merit so incessant that each reader 
is incredidous of the perception of other readers. 

This power of expression, or of transferring the 
inmost truth of things into music and verse, makes 
him the type of the poet and has added a new 
problem to metaphysics. This is that which tlirows 
him into natural history, as a main production of 
the globe, and as announcing new eras and amelio- 
rations. Things were mirrored in his poetry with- 
out loss or blur : he could paint the fine with pre- 
cision, the great with compass, the tragic and the 
comic indifferently and without any distortion or 
favor. He carried his powerful execution into 



70 SHAKSPEARE ; OR, THE POET. 

minute details, to a hair point ; finishes an eyelash 
or a dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain ; and 
yet these, like nature's, will bear the scrutiny of 
the solar microscope. 

In short, he is the chief example to prove that 
more or less of production, more or fewer pictures, 
is a thing indifferent. He had the power to make 
one picture. Daguerre learned how to let one 
flower etch its image on his plate of iodine, and 
then proceeds at leisure to etch a million. There 
are always objects ; but there was never represen- 
tation. Here is perfect representation, at last ; and 
now let the world of figures sit for their portraits. 
No recipe can be given for the making of a Shaks- 
peare ; but the possibility of the translation of 
things into song is demonstrated. 

His lyric j)ower lies in the genius of the piece. 
The sonnets, though their excellence is lost in the 
splendor of the dramas, are as inimitable as they; 
and it is not a merit of lines, but a total merit of 
the piece ; like the tone of voice of some incom- 
parable i^erson, so is this a speech of poetic beings, 
and any clause as unproducible now as a whole 
poem. 

Though the speeches in the plays, and single 
lines, have a beauty which tempts the ear to pause 
on them for their euphuism, yet the sentence is 
so loaded with meaning and so linked with its 



SHAKSPEARE ; OL', THE POET, 71 

foregoers and followers, that the logician is satis- 
fied. His means are as admirable as his ends ; 
every subordinate invention, by which he helps 
hmiself to connect some irreconcilable opposites, 
is a poem too. lie is not reduced to dismount and 
walk because his horses are running off with him 
in some distant direction : he always rides. 

The finest poetry was first experience ; but the 
thought has suffered a transformation since it was 
an experience. Cultivated men often attain a good 
degree of skill in writing verses ; but it is easy to 
read, through their poems, their personal history : 
any one acquainted with the parties can name every 
figure ; this is Andrew and that is Rachel. The 
sense thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar 
with wings, and not yet a butterfly. In the poet's 
mind the fact has gone quite over into the new 
element of thought, and has lost all that is exuvial. 
This generosity abides with Shakspeare. We say, 
from the truth and closeness of his pictures, that he 
knows the lesson by heart. Yet there is not a 
trace of egotism. 

One more royal trait properly belongs to the 
poet. I mean his cheerfidness, without which no 
man can be a poet, — for beauty is his aim. He 
loves virtue, not for its obligation but for its grace : 
he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the 
lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the 



72 SHAKSPEARE ; OB, THE POET. 

spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the uni- 
verse. Epicurus relates that poetry hath such 
charms that a lover might forsake his mistress to 
partake of them. And the true bards have been 
noted for their firm and cheerful temper. Homer 
lies in sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and 
Saadi says, " It was rumored abroad that I was 
penitent ; but what had I to do with repentance ? " 
Not less sovereign and cheerful, — much more sov- 
ereign and cheerful, is the tone of Shakspeare. 
His name suggests joy and emancipation to the 
heart of men. If he should appear in any com- 
pany of human souls, who would net march in his 
troop ? He touches nothing that does not borrow 
health and longevity from his festal style. 

And now, how stands the account of man with 
this bard and benefactor, when, in solitude, shut- 
ting our ears to the reverberations of his fame, we 
seek to strike the balance ? Solitude has austere 
lessons ; it can teach us to spare both heroes and 
poets ; and it weighs Shakspeare also, and finds him 
to share the halfness and imperfection of humanity. 

Shakspeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the 
splendor of meaning that plays over the visible 
world ; knew that a tree had another use than for 
apples, and corn another than for meal, and the 
baU of the earth, than for tillage and roads : that 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 73 

these things bore a second and finer harvest to the 
mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and convey- 
ing in all their natural history a certain mute 
commentary on human life. Shakspeare employed 
them as colors to compose his picture. He rested 
in their beauty ; and never took the step which 
seemed inevitable to such genius, namely to explore 
the virtue which resides in these symbols and im- 
parts this power : — what is that which they them- 
selves say? He converted the elements which 
waited on his command, into entertainments. He 
v/as master of the revels to mankind. Is it not as 
if one should have, through majestic powers of 
science, the comets given into his hand, or the 
planets and their moons, and should draw them 
from their orbits to glare with the municipal fire- 
works on a holiday night, and advertise in all 
towns, " Very superior pyrotechny this evening " ? 
Are the agents of nature, and the power to under- 
stand them, worth no more than a street serenade, 
or the breath of a cigar ? One remembers again 
the trumpet-text in the Koran, — " The heavens 
and the earth and all that is between them, think 
ye we have created them in jest?" As long as the 
question is of talent and mental power, the world 
of men has not his equal to show. But when the 
question is, to life and its materials and its auxili- 
aries, how does he profit me ? What does it sig- 



74 SHAKSFEARE; OR, THE POET. 

nify? It is but a Twelfth Night, or Midsummer- 
Night's Dream, or Winter Evening's Tale : what sig- 
nifies another picture more or less ? The Egyptian 
verdict of the Shakspeare Societies comes to mind ; 
that he was a jovial actor an 1 manager. I can not 
marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable men 
have led lives in some sort of keeping with their 
thought ; but this man, in wide contrast. Had he 
been less, had he reached only the common measure 
of great authors, of Bacon, Milton, Tasso, Cervantes, 
we might leave the fact in the twilight of human 
fate : but that this man of men, he who gave to the 
science of mind a new and larger subject than had 
ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity 
some furlongs forward into Chaos, — that he should 
not be wise for himself ; — it must even go into the 
world's history that the best poet led an obscure 
and profane life, using his genius for the public 
amusement. 

Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite, 
German and Swede, beheld the same objects : they 
also saw through them that which was contained. 
And to what purpose? The beauty straightway 
vanished ; they read commandments, all-excluding 
mountainous duty; an obligation, a sadness, as of 
piled mountains, fell on them, and life became 
ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim's progress, a probation, 
beleaguered round with doleful histories of Adam's 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 75 

fall and curse behind us ; with doomsdays and pur- 
gatorial and penal fires before us ; and the heart 
of the seer and the heart of the listener sank in 
them. 

It must be conceded that these are half-views of 
half-men. The world still wants its poet-j)riest, a 
reconciler, who shall not trifle, with Shakspeare the 
player, nor shall grope in graves, with Swedenborg 
the mourner ; but who shall see, speak, and act, with 
equal inspiration. For knowledge will brighten 
the sunshine ; right is more beautiful than private 
affection ; and love is compatible with universal 
wisdom. 



SOCIAL AIMS. 



Much ill-natured criticism has been directed on 
American manners. I do not think it is to be re- 
sented. Rather, if we are wise, we shall listen and 
mend. Our critics will then be our best friends, 
though they did not mean it. But in every sense 
the subject of manners has a constant interest to 
thoughtful persons. Who does not delight in fine 
manners ? Their charm cannot be predicted or 
overstated. 'T is perpetual promise of more than 
can be fulfilled. It is music and sculpture and 
picture to many who do not pretend to apprecia- 
tion of those arts. It is even true that grace is 
more beautiful than beauty. Yet how impossible 
to overcome the obstacle of an unlucky tempera- 
ment and acquire good manners, unless by living 
■with the well-bred from the start ; and this makes 
the value of ^wise forethought to give ourselves and 
our children as much as possible the habit of culti- 
vated society. 

'T is an inestimable hint that I owe to a few per- 
sons of fine manners, that they make behavior the 
very first sign of force, — beha\dor, and not per- 



SOCIAL AIMS. 11 

formance, or talent, or, niiich less, wealth. Whilst 
almost everybody has a supplicating eye turned on 
events and things and other j^ersons, a few natures 
are central and forever unfold, and these alone 
charm us. He whose word or deed you cannot 
predict, who answers you without any supplication 
in his eye, who draws his determination from within, 
and draws it instantly, — that man rules. 

The staple figure in novels is the man of aplomb^ 
who sits, among the young aspirants and desperates, 
quite sure and compact, and, never sharing their 
affections or debilities, hurls his word like a bullet 
when occasion requires, knows his way, and carries 
his points. They may scream or applaud, he is 
never engaged or heated. Napoleon is the type of 
this class in modern history ; Byron's heroes in 
poetry. But we for the most part are all drawn 
into the charivari ; we chide, lament, cavil, and re- 
criminate. 

I think Hans Andersen's story of the cobweb 
cloth woven so fine that it was invisible, — woven 
for the king's garment, — must mean manners, 
which do really clothe a princely nature. Such a 
one can well go in a blanket, if he woidd. In the 
gymnasium or on the sea-beach his superiority does 
not leave him. But he who has not this fine gar- 
ment of behavior is studious of dress, and then not 
less of house and furnitme and pictures and gar- 



78 SOCIAL AIMS. 

dens, in all which he hopes to \\q i^^^'dii^ and not 
be exposed. 

" Manners are stronger than laws." Their vast 
convenience I must always admire. The perfect 
defence and isolation which they effect makes an in- 
superable protection. Though the person so clothed 
wrestle with you, or swim with you, lodge in the 
same chamber, eat at the same table, he is yet a 
thousand miles off, and can at any moment finish 
with you. Manners seem to say, You are you, 
and I am I. In the most delicate natures, fine 
temperament and culture build this impassable wall. 
Balzac finely said : " Kings themselves cannot force 
the exquisite politeness of distance to capitulate, 
hid behind its shield of bronze." 

Nature values manners. See how she has pre- 
pared for them. Who teaches manners of majesty, 
of frankness, of grace, of humility, — who but the 
adoring aunts and cousins that surround a young 
child ? The babe meets such courting and flattery 
as only kings receive when adidt ; and, trying ex- 
periments, and at perfect leisure with these posture- 
masters and flatterers all day, he throws himself 
into all the attitudes that correspond to theirs. 
Are they humble? he is composed. Are they eager? 
he is nonchalant. Are they encroaching? he is 
dignified and inexorable. And this scene is daily 
repeated in hovels as well as in high houses. 



SOCIAL ALUS. 79 

Nature is the best posture-master. An awkward 
man is graceful wlieu asleep, or when hard at work, 
or agreeably amused. The attitudes of children are 
gentle, persuasive, royal, in their games and in 
their house-talk and in the street, before they have 
learned to cringe. 'Tis impossible but thought 
disposes the limbs and the walk, and is masterly 
or secondary. No art can contravene it or conceal 
it. Give me a thought, and my hands and legs 
and voice and face will all go riglit. And we are 
awkward for want of thought. The inspiration is 
scanty, and does not arrive at the extremities. 

It is a commonplace of romances to show the 
ungainly manners of the pedant who has lived too 
long in college. Intellectual men pass for vulgar, 
and are timid and heavy with the elegant. But if 
the elegant are also intellectual, instantly the hesi- 
tating scholar is inspired, transformed, and exhibits 
the best style of manners. An intellectual man, 
though of feeble spirit, is instantly reinforced by 
being put into the company of scholars, and, to the 
surprise of everybody, becomes a lawgiver. We 
think a man unable and desponding. It is only 
that he is misplaced. Put him with new compan- 
ions, and they wiU fii^d in him excellent qualities, 
unsuspected accomplishments, and the joy of life. 
'T is a great point in a gallery, how you hang pic- 
tures ; and not less in society, how you seat your 



80 SOCIAL AIMS. 

party. The circumstance of circumstance is timing 
and placing. When a man meets his accurate 
mate, society begins, and life is delicious. 

What happiness they give, — what ties they 
form ! Whilst one man by his manners pins me 
to the wall, with another I walk among the starSo 
One man can, by his voice, lead the cheer of a reg- 
iment ; another will have no following. Nature 
made us all intelligent of these signs, for our safety 
and our happiness. Whilst certain faces are illu- 
mined with intelligence, decorated with invitation, 
others are marked with warnings : certain voices 
are hoarse and truculent ; sometimes they even 
bark. There is the same difference between heavy 
and genial manners as between the perceptions of 
octogenarians and those of young girls who see 
everything in the twinkling of an eye. 

Manners are the revealers of secrets, the betray- 
ers of any disproportion or want of symmetry in 
mind and character. It is the law of our constitu- 
tion that every change in our experience instantly 
indicates itself on our countenance and carriage, as 
the lapse of time tells itself on the face of a clock. 
We may be too obtuse to read it, but the record is 
there. Some men may be obtuse to read it, but 
some men are not obtuse and do read it. In Bor- 
Tow's " Lavengro," the gypsy instantly detects, by 
his companion's face and behavior, that some good 



SOCIAL ALMS. 81 

fortune lias befallen him, and that he has money. 
We sa\% in these days, that credit is to be abolished 
in trade : is it ? When a stranger comes to buy 
goods of you, do you not look in his face and an- 
swer according to what you read there ? Credit is to 
be abolished ? Can't you abolish faces and charac- 
ter, of which credit is the reflection ? As long as 
men are born babes they will live on credit for the 
first fourteen or eighteen years of their life. Every 
innocent man has in his countenance a promise to 
pay, and hence credit. Less credit will there be ? 
You are mistaken. There will always be more and 
more. Character must be trusted ; and just in 
proportion to the morality of a people will be the 
expansion of the credit system. 

There is even a little rule of prudence for the 
young experimenter which Dr. Franklin omitted to 
set down, yet which the youth may find useful, — 
,Do not go to ask your debtor the payment of a 
debt on the day when you have no other resource. 
He will learn by your air and tone how it is with 
you, and will treat you as a beggar. But work 
and starve a little longer. Wait till your affairs 
go better and you have other means at hand ; you 
will then ask in a different tone, and he will treat 
your claim with entire respect. 

Now we all wish to be graceful, and do justice to 
ourselves by our manners ; but youth in America is 



82 SOCIAL AIMS. 

wont to be poor and hurried, not at ease, or not in 
society where high behavior could be taught. But 
the sentiment of honor and the wish to serve make 
all our pains superfluous. Life is not so short but 
that there is always time enough for courtesy. 
Self-command is the main elegance. " Keep cool, 
and you command everybody," said St. Just ; and 
the wily old Talleyrand would still say, Surtout, 
messieu7's, pas de zele, — " Above all, gentlemen, 
no heat." 

Why have you statues in your hall, but to teach 
you that, when the door-bell rings, you shall sit 
like them. " Eat at your table as you would eat 
at the table of the king," said Confucius. It is an 
excellent custom of the Quakers, if only for a 
school of manners, — the silent prayer before meals. 
It has the effect to stop mirth, and introduce a 
moment of reflection. After the pause, all resume 
their usual intercourse from a vantage-ground. 
What a check to the violent manners which some- 
times come to the table, — of wrath, and whin- 
ing, and heat in trifles I 

'T is a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration. A 
lady loses as soon as she admires too easily and too 
much. In man or woman, the face and the person 
lose power when they are on the strain to express 
admiration. A man makes his inferiors his superi- 
ors by heat. Why need you, who are not a gossip, 



SOCIAL ATMS. 83 

talk as a gossip, and tell eagerly what the neighbors 
or the journals say ? State your opinion without 
apology. The attitude is the main point, assuring 
your companion that, come good news or come bad, 
you remain in good heart and good mind, which 
is the best news you can possibly communicate. 
Self-control is the rule. You have in you there a 
noisy, sensual savage, which you are to keep down, 
and turn all his strength to beauty. For example, 
what a seneschal and detective is laughter ! It 
seems to require several generations of education 
to train a squeaking or a shouting habit out of a 
man. Sometimes, when in almost all expressions 
the Choctaw and the slave have been worked out 
of him, a coarse nature still betrays itself in his 
contemptible squeals of joy. It is necessary for the 
purification of drawing-rooms that these entertain- 
ing explosions should be under strict control. Lord 
Chesterfield had early made this discovery, for he 
says, " I am sure that since I had the use of my 
reason, no human being has ever heard me laugh." 
I know that there go two to this game, and, in the 
presence of certain formidable wits, savage nature 
must sometimes rush out in some disorder. 

To pass to an allied topic, one word or two in 
regard to dress, in which our civilization instantly 
shows itself. No nation is dressed with more good 
sense than ours. And everybody sees certain moral 



84 SOCIAL AIMS. 

benefit in it. When the young European emigrant, 
after a summer's labor, puts on for the first time a 
new coat, he puts on much more. His good and 
becoming clothes put him on thinking that he must 
behave like people who are so dressed ; and silently 
and steadily his behavior mends. But quite another 
class of our own youth I should remind, of dress 
in general, that some people need it and others 
need it not. Thus a king or a general does not need 
a fine coat, and a commanding person may save 
himself all solicitude on that point. There are al- 
ways slovens in State Street or Wall Street, who 
are not less considered. If a man have manners 
and talent he may dress roughly and carelessly. 
It is only when mind and character slumber that 
the dress can be seen. If the intellect were always 
awake, and every noble sentiment, the man might 
go in huckaback or mats, and his dress would be 
admired and imitated. Remember George Her- 
bert's maxim, " This coat with my discretion wiU 
be brave." If, however, a man has not firm nerves 
and has keen sensibility, it is perhaps a wise econ- 
omy to go to a good shop and dress himself ii-re- 
proachably. He can then dismiss all care from his 
mind, and may easily find that performance an ad- 
dition of confidence, a fortification that turns the 
scale in social encounters, and allows him to go 
gayly into conversations where else he had been 



SOCIAL AIMS. 85 

dry and embarrassed. I am not ignorant, — I have 
heard with admiring submission the experience of 
the lady who declared that " the sense of being 
perfectly well - dressed gives a feeling of inward 
tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow.'* 
Thus much for manners : but we are not content 
with pantomime ; we say, This is only for the eyes. 
We want real relations of the mind and the heart ; 
we want friendship ; we want knowledge ; we want 
virtue ; a more inward existence to read the history 
of each other. Welfare requires one or two com- 
panions of intelligence, probity, and grace, to wear 
out life with, — persons with whom we can speak a 
few reasonable words every day, by whom we can 
measure ourselves, and who shall hold us fast to 
good sense and virtue ; and these we are always in 
search of. He must be inestimable to us to whom 
we can say what we cannot say to ourselves. Yet 
now and then we say things to our mates, or hear 
things from them, which seem to put it out of the 
power of the parties to be strangers again. " Ei- 
ther death or a friend," is a Persian proverb. I 
suppose I give the experience of many when I give 
my own. A few times in my life it has happened 
to me to meet persons of so good a nature and so 
good breeding that every topic was oj^en and dis- 
cussed without possibility of offence, — persons who 
could not be shocked. One of my friends said in 



86 SOCIAL AIMS. 

speaking of certain associates, " There is not one of 
them but I can offend at any moment." But to 
the company I am now considering, were no ter- 
rors, no vulgarity. All topics were broached, — 
life, love, marriage, sex, hatred, suicide, magic, the- 
ism, art, poetry, religion, myself, thyself, all selves, 
and whatever else, with a security and vivacity 
which belonged to the nobility of the parties and 
to their brave truth. The life of these persons was 
conducted in the same calm and affirmative man- 
ner as their discourse. Life with them was an ex- 
periment continually varied, full of results, full of 
grandeur, and by no means the hot and hurried 
business which passes in the world. The delight in 
good company, in pure, brilliant, social atmosphere ; 
the incomparable satisfaction of a society in which 
everything can be safely said, in which every mem- 
ber returns a true echo, in which a wise freedom, 
an ideal republic of sense, simplicity, knowledge, 
and thorough good-meaning abide, — doubles the 
value of life. It is this that justifies to each the 
jealousy with which the doors are kept. Do not 
look sourly at the set or the club which does not 
choose you. Every highly-organized person knows 
the value of the social barriers, since the best soci- 
ety has often been spoiled to him by the intrusion 
of bad companions. He of all men would keep the 
right of choice sacred, and feel that the exclusions 



SOCIAL AIMS. 87 

are in the interest of the admissions, though they 
happen at this moment to thwart his wishes. 

The hunger for company is keen, but it must be 
discriminating, and must be economized. 'T is a de- 
fect in our manners that they have not yet reached 
the prescribing a limit to visits. That every well- 
dressed lady or gentleman should be at liberty to 
exceed ten minutes in his or her call on serious 
people, shows a civilization still rude. A universal 
etiquette should fix an iron limit after which a mo- 
ment should not be allowed without explicit leave 
granted on request of either the giver or receiver 
of the visit. There is inconvenience in such strict- 
ness, but vast inconvenience in the want of it. To 
trespass on a public servant is to trespass on a 
nation's time. Yet presidents of the United States 
are afflicted by rude Western and Southern gossips 
(I hope it is only by them) until the gossip's im- 
measurable legs are tired of sitting ; then he strides 
out and the nation is relieved. 

It is very certain that sincere and happy conver- 
sation doubles our powers ; that in the effort to un- 
fold our thought to a friend we make it clearer to 
ourselves, and surround it with illustrations that 
help and delight us. It may happen that each hears 
from the other a better wisdom than any one else 
will ever hear from either. But these ties are 
taken cai*e of by Providence to each of us. A wise 



88 SOCIAL AIMS. 

man once said to me that " all whom he knew, 
met : " — meaning that he need not take pains to 
introduce the persons whom he valued to each 
other : they were sure to be drawn together as by 
gravitation. The soul of a man must be the ser- 
vant of another. The true friend must have an 
attraction to whatever virtue is in us. Our chief 
want in life, — is it not somebody who can make 
us do what we can ? And we are easily great with 
the loved and honored associate. We come out of 
our eggshell existence and see the great dome arch- 
ing over us ; see the zenith above and the nadir 
under us. 

Speech is power : speech is to persuade, to con- 
vert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his 
bad sense into your good sense. You are to be 
missionary and carrier of all that is good and no- 
ble. Virtues speak to ^drtues, vices to vices, — 
each to their own kind in the people with whom we 
deal. If you are suspiciously and dryly on your 
guard, so is he or she. If you rise to frankness 
and generosity, they will respect it now or later. 

In this art of conversation. Woman, if not the 
queen and victor, is the lawgiver. If every one 
recalled his experiences, he might find the best in 
the speech of superior women ; — which was better 
than song, and carried ingenuity, character, wise 
counsel and affection, as easily as the wit with 



SOCIAL AIMS. 89 

which it was adorned. They are not only wise 
themselves, they make us wise. No one can be a 
master in conversation who has not learned much 
from women ; their presence and ins})iration are 
essential to its success. Steele said of his mistress, 
that " to have loved her was a liberal education." 
Shenstone gave no bad account of this influence in 
his description of the French woman : " There is a 
quality in which no woman in the world can com- 
pete with her, — it is the power of intellectual irri- 
tation. She will draw wit out of a fool. She strikes 
with such address the chords of self-lovo, that she 
gives unexpected vigor and agility to fancy, and 
electrifies a body that appeared non-electric." Cole- 
ridge esteems cultivated women as the depositaries 
and guardians of " English undefiled ; " and Lu- 
ther commends that accomplishment of " pure Ger- 
man speech " of his wife. 

Madame de Stael, by the unanimous consent of 
all who knew her, was the most extraordinary con- 
verser that was known in her time, and it was a 
time full of eminent men and women ; she knew all 
distinguished persons in letters or society in Eng- 
land, Germany, and Italy, as well as in France ; 
though she said, with characteristic nationality, 
" Conversation, like talent, exists only in France." 
Madame de Stael valued nothing but conversation 
When they showed her the beautiful Lake Leman, 



90 SOCIAL AIMS. 

she exclaimed, " O for the gutter of the Rue de 
Bac ! " the street in Paris in which her house stood. 
And she said one day, seriously, to M. Mol^, " If it 
were not for respect to human opinions, I would not 
open my window to see the Bay of Naples for the 
first time, whilst I would go five hundred leagues 
to talk with a man of genius whom I had not seen." 
Sainte-Beuve tells us of the privileged circle at 
Coppet, that after making an excursion one day, 
the party returned in two coaches from Chambery 
to Aix, on the way to Coppet. The first coach had 
many rueful accidents to relate, — a terrific thun- 
der-storm, shocking roads, and danger and gloom 
to the whole company. The party in the second 
coach, on arriving, heard this story with surprise ; 
— - of thunder-storm, of steeps, of mud, of danger, 
they knew nothing ; no, they had forgotten earth, 
and breathed a purer air : such a conversation be- 
tween Madame de Stael and Madame Recamier 
and Benjamin Constant and Schlegel ! they were 
all in a state of delight. The intoxication of the 
conversation had made them insensible to all no- 
tice of weather or rough roads. Madame de Tess^ 
said, " If I were Queen, I should command Mad- 
ame de Stael to talk to me every day." Conversa- 
tion fills all gaps, supplies all deficiencies. What 
a good trait is that recorded of Madame de Main- 
tenon, that, during dinner, the servant slipped to 



SOCIAL AIMS. 91 

her side, " Please, madame, one anecdote more, for 
there is no roast to-day." 

Politics, war, party, luxury, avarice, fashion, are 
all asses with loaded panniers to serve the kitchen 
of Intellect, the king. There is nothing that does 
not pass into lever or weapon. 

And yet there are trials enough of nerve and 
character, brave choices enough of taking the part 
of truth and of the oppressed against the oppressor, 
in privatest circles. A right speech is not well to 
be distinguished from action. Courage to ask ques- 
tions ; courage to expose our ignorance. The great 
gain is, not to shine, not to conquer your compan- 
ion, — then you learn nothing but conceit, — but 
to find a companion who knows what you do not; 
to tilt with him and be overthrown, horse and foot, 
with utter destruction of all your logic and learn- 
ing. There is a defeat that is useful. Then you 
can see the real and the counterfeit, and will never 
accept the counterfeit again. You will adopt the 
art of war that has defeated you. You will ride to 
battle horsed on the very logic which you found ir- 
resistible. You will accept the fertile truth, in- 
stead of the solenm customary lie. 

Let nature bear the expense. The attitude, the 
tone, is all. Let our eyes not look away, but meet. 
Let us not look east and west for materials of con- 
versation, but rest in presence and unity. A just 



92 SOCIAL AIMS. 

feeling will fast enough supply fuel for discourse, 
if speaking be more grateful than silence. When 
people come to see us, we foolishly prattle, lest we 
be inhospitable. But things said for conversation 
are chalk eggs. Don't say things. What you are 
stands over you the while, and thunders so that I 
cannot hear what you say to the contrary. A lady 
of my acquaintance said, "I don't care so much 
for what they say as I do for what makes them say 
it." 

The main point is to throw yourself on the truth, 
and say, with Newton, " There 's no contending 
against facts." When Molyneux fancied that the 
observations of the nutation of the earth's axis de- 
stroyed Newton's theory of gravitation, he tried to 
break it softly to Sir Isaac, who only answered, 
^' It may be so, there 's no arguing against facts 
and experiments." 

But there are people who cannot be cultivated, 
— people on whom speech makes no impression ; 
swainish, morose people, who must be kept down 
and quieted as you would those who are a little 
tipsy; others, who are not only swainish, but are 
prompt to take oath that swainishness is the only 
culture ; and though their odd wit may have some 
salt for you, your friends would not relish it. Bolt 
these out. And I have seen a man of genius who 
made me think that if other men were like him co- 



SOCIAL AIMS. 93 

operation were impossible. Must we always talk 
for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, 
and joy ? Here is centrality and penetration, strong 
understanding, and the higher gifts, the insight of 
the real, or from the real, and the moral rectitude 
which belongs to it : but all this and all liis re- 
sources of wit and invention are lost to me in every 
experiment that I make to hold intercourse with 
his mind ; always some weary, captious paradox to 
fight you with, and the time and temper wasted. 
And beware of jokes ; too much temperance cannot 
be used : inestimable for sauce, but corrupting for 
food, we go away hollow and ashamed. As soon 
as the company give in to this enjoyment, we shall 
have no Olympus. JTrue wit never made us laugh. 
Mahomet seems to have borrowed by anticipation 
of several centuries a leaf from the mind of Swe- 
denborg, when he wrote in the Koran : — 

" On the day of resurrection, those who have indulged 
in ridicule will be called to the door of Paradise, and 
have it shut in their faces when they reach it. Again, 
on their turning back, they will be called to another 
door, and again, on reaching it, will see it closed against 
them ; and so on, ad infinitum, without end." 

Shun the negative side. Never worry people 
with your contritions, nor with dismal views of 
politics or society. Never name sickness : even if 
you could trust yourself on that perilous ropic, 



94 SOCIAL AIMS. 

beware of unmuzzling a valetudinarian, who will 
soon give you your fill of it. 

The law of the table is Beauty, — a respect to 
the common soul of all the guests. Everything 
is unseasonable which is private to two or three 
or any portion of the company. Tact never vio- 
lates for a moment this law; never intrudes the 
orders of the house, the vices of the absent, or a 
tariff of expenses, or professional privacies ; as we 
say, we never " talk shop " before company. Lov- 
ers abstain from caresses and haters from insults 
whilst they sit in one parlor with common friends. 

Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other 
people's opinions. See how it lies there in you; 
and if there is no counsel, offer none. What we 
want is not your activity or interference with your 
mind, but your content to be a vehicle of the sim- 
ple truth. The way to have large occasional views, 
as in a political or social crisis, is to have large 
habitual views. When men consult you, it is not 
that they wish you to stand tip toe and pump your 
brains, but to apply your habitual view, your wis- 
dom, to the present question, forbearing all pedan- 
tries and the very name of argument ; for in good 
conversation parties don't speak to the words, but 
to the meanings of each other. 

Manners first, then conversation. Later, we see 
that as life was not in manners, so it is not in 



SOCIAL AIMS. 95 

talk. Manners are external ; talk is occasional ; 
these require certain material conditions, human 
labor for food, clothes, house, tools, and, in short, 
plenty and ease, — since only so can certain finer 
and finest powers appear and expand. In a whole 
nation of Hottentots there shall not be one valuable 
man, — valuable out of his tribe. In every million 
of Europeans or of Americans there shall be thou- 
sands who would be valuable on any spot on the 
globe. 

The consideration the rich possess in all societies 
is not without meaning or right. It is the approval 
given by the human understanding to the act of 
creating value by knowledge and labor. It is the 
sense of every human being that man should have 
this dominion of nature, should arm himseH with 
tools and force the elements to drudge for him and 
give him power. Every one must seek to secure 
his independence ; but he need not be rich. The 
old Confucius in China admitted the benefit, but 
stated the limitation : '* If the search for riches were 
sure to be successful, though I sliould become a 
gi'oom with whip in hand to get them, I will do so. 
As the search may not be successfid, I will follow 
after that which I love." There is in America a 
general conviction in the mmds of all mature men, 
that every young man of good faculty and good 
habits can by perseverance attain to an adequate 



96 SOCIAL AIMS. 

estate ; if he have a turn for business, and a quick 
eye for the opportunities which are always offering 
for investment, he can come to wealth, and in such 
good season as to enjoy as well as transmit it. 

Every human society wants to be officered by a 
best class, who shall be masters instructed in all 
the great arts of life ; shall be wise, temperate, 
brave, public men, adorned with dignity and accom- 
plishments. Every country wishes this, and each 
has taken its own method to secure such service to 
the state. In Europe, ancient and modern, it has 
been attempted to secure the existence of a superior 
class by hereditary nobility, with estates transmitted 
by primogeniture and entail. But in the last age, 
this system has been on its trial, and the verdict of 
mankind is pretty nearly pronounced. That method 
secured permanence of families, firmness of cus- 
toms, a certain external culture and good taste; 
gratified the ear with preserving historic names: 
but the heroic father did not surely have heroic 
sons, and still less surely heroic grandsons ; wealth 
and ease corrupted the race. 

In America, the necessity of clearing the forest, 
laying out town and street, and building every 
house and barn and fence, then church and town- 
house, exhausted such means as the Pilgrims 
brought, and made the whole population poor ; 
and the like necessity is still found in each new 



SOCIAL AIMS. 97 

settlement in the Territories. These needs gave 
their character to the public debates in every vil- 
lage and State. I have been often impressed at 
our country town-meetings with the accumulated 
virility, in each village, of five or six or eight or ten 
men, who speak so well, and so easily handle the 
affairs of the town. I often hear the business of a 
little town (with which I am most familiar) dis- 
cussed with a clearness and thoroughness, and with 
a generosity too, that would have satisfied me had 
it been in one of the larger capitals. I am sure each 
one of my readers has a parallel experience. And 
every one knows that in every town or city is 
always to be found a certain number of public- 
spirited men who perform, unpaid, a great amount 
of hard work in the interest of the churches, of 
schools, of public grounds, works of taste and refine- 
ment. And as in civil duties, so in social power 
and duties. Our gentlemen of the old school, that 
is, of the school of Washington, Adams, and Ham- 
ilton, were bred after English types, and that style 
of breeding furnished fine examples in the last gen- 
eration ; but, though some of us have seen such, I 
doubt they are all gone. But nature is not poorer 
to-day. With all our haste, and slipshod ways, and 
flippant self-assertion, I have seen examples of new 
grace and power in address that honor the country. 
It was my fortune not long ago, with my eyes di- 



98 SOCIAL AIMS. 

reeled on this subject, to fall in with an American 
to be proud of. I said never was such force, good 
meaning, good sense, good action, combined with 
such domestic lovely behavior, such modesty and 
persistent preference for others. Wherever he 
moved he was the benefactor. It is of course that 
he should ride well, shoot well, sail well, keep house 
well, administer affairs well ; but he was the best 
talker, also, in the company : what with a per- 
petual practical wisdom, with an eye always to the 
working of the thing, what with the multitude and 
distinction of his facts (and one detected continu- 
ally that he had a hand in everything that has 
been done), and in the temperance with which he 
parried all offence and opened the eyes of the per- 
son he talked with without contradicting him. Yet 
I said to myself. How little this man suspects, with 
his sympathy for men and his respect for lettered 
and scientific people, that he is not likely, in any 
company, to meet a man superior to himself. And 
I think this is a good country that can bear such a 
creature as he is. 

The young men in America at this moment take 
little thought of what men in England are thinking 
or doing. That is the point which decides the wel- 
fare of a people ; which way does it look f If to 
any other people, it is not well with them. If occu- 
pied in its own affairs and thoughts and men, with 



SOCIAL AIMS. 99 

a heat which excludes almost the notice of any 
other people, — as the Jews, the Greeks, the Per- 
sians, the Romans, the Arabians, the French, the 
English, at their best times have been, — they are 
sublime ; and we know that in this abstraction they 
are executing excellent work. Amidst the calami- 
ties which war has brought on our country this one 
benefit has accrued, — that our eyes are withdrawn 
from England, withdrawn from France, and look 
homeward. We have come to feel that "by our- 
selves our safety must be bought ; " to know the 
vast resources of the continent, the good-will that 
is in the people, their conviction of the great moral 
advantages of freedom, social equality, education 
and religious culture, and their determination to 
hold these fast, and, by them, to hold fast the coun- 
try and penetrate every square mile of it with this 
American civilization. 

The consolation and happy moment of life, aton- 
ing for all short-comings, is sentiment ; a flame of 
affection or delight in the heart, burning up sud- 
denly for its object ; — as the love of the mother 
for her child ; of the child for its mate ; of the youth 
for his friend ; of the scholar for his pursuit ; of the 
boy for sea-life, or for painting, or in the passion 
for his country ; or in the tender-hearted philan- 
thropist to spend and be spent for some romantic 
charity, as Howard for the prisoner, or John Brown 



100 SOCIAL AIMS. 

for the slave. No matter what the object is, so it 
be good, this flame of desire makes life sweet and 
tolerable. It reinforces the heart that feels it, 
makes all its acts and words gracious and interest- 
ing. Now society in towns is infested by persons 
who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit 
the expression of them. These we call sentimental- 
ists, — talkers who mistake the description for the 
thing, saying for having. They have, they tell you, 
an intense love of nature ; poetry, — O, they adore 
poetry, — and roses, and the moon, and the cavalry 
regiment, and the governor ; they love liberty, 
" dear liberty ! " they worship virtue, " dear \dr- 
tue ! " Yes, they adopt whatever merit is in good 
repute, and almost make it hateful with their 
praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder 
we feel ; we shiver with cold. A little experience 
acquaints us with the unconvertibility of the senti- 
mentalist, the soul that is lost by mimicking soul. 
Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the 
homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can 
be devised for the debauchee of sentiment ? Was 
ever one converted ? The innocence and ignorance 
of the patient is the first difficulty ; he believes his 
disease is blooming health. A rough realist or a 
phalanx of realists would be prescribed ; but that is 
like proposing to mend your bad road with dia- 
monds. Then poverty, famine, war, imprisonment, 



SOCIAL AIMS. 101 

might be tried. Another cure would be to fight 
fire with fire, to match a sentimentalist with a sen- 
timentalist. I think each might begin to suspect 
that something was wrong. 

Would we codify the laws that should reign in 
households, and whose daily transgression annoys 
and mortifies us and degrades our household life, 
we must learn to adorn every day with sacrifices. 
Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices. 
Temperance, couiage, love, are made up of the same 
jewels. Listen to every prompting of honor. "As 
soon as sacrifice becomes a duty and necessity to 
the man, I see no limit to the horizon which opens 
before me. " ^ 

Of course those people, and no others, interest us, 
who believe in their thought, who are absorbed, if 
you please to say so, in their own dream. They 
only can give the key and leading to better society : 
those who delight in each other only because both 
delight in the eternal laws ; who forgive nothing to 
each other ; who, by their joy and homage to these, 
are made incapable of conceit, which destroys al- 
most all the fine wits. Any other affection be- 
tween men than this geometric one of relation to 
the same thing, is a mere mush of materialism. 

These are the bases of civil and polite society; 
namely, manners, conversation, lucrative labor, and 
1 Ernest Keuau. 



102 SOCIAL AIMS, 

public action ; whether political, or in the leading 
of social institutions. We have much to regret, 
much to mend, in our society ; but I believe that 
with all liberal and hopeful men there is, a firm 
faith in the beneficent results which we really en- 
joy ; that intelligence, manly enterprise, good educa- 
tion, virtuous life and elegant manners have been 
and are found here, and, we hope, in the next gen- 
eration will still more abound. 



NOTES. 

The Superlative. 

This essay was contributed to The Century Magazine for 
F'ebruary, 1882, and is contained in the tenth volume of the 
Riverside Edition of Emerson's collected writings. 

Page 1. The Maine Law is the popular name for one of 
the earliest attempts at enforcing total abstinence from 
intoxicating- drinks by legislative enactment. A law for 
prohibiting drinking-shops and tippling-houses was passed 
in the State of Maine in 1851, at the instance especially of 
Neal Dow, then governor of the state. 

Page 3. The legend of Demophoon makes him to have 
been immersed in fire in his infancy in order to secure im- 
mortality for him. 

Page 4. William Ellery Channing, a Unitarian divine 
(1780-1842), was a great figure in Boston when Emerson 
was a 3'oung man, and the dominant force in ethics. 

Page 6. Lord Chesterfield was an English nobleman of 
the eighteenth century, who, in a time of great artificiality, 
had the reputation of a sagacious philosopher, but whose 
Letters to his Son breathe the stiHing air of mere world- 
liness. 

There were two Schlegels, brothers, whose writings had 
been translated into English and published in Bolin's Li- 
brary, and were much read in Emerson's prime : Augustus 
William Schlegel, best known by his Lectures on Dramatic 
Art and Literature, and Frederick Schlegel, by his Philosophy 
of History. 

Page 10. Magliabecchi (pronounced malyabek'kee), an 



104 NOTES. 

Italian scholar, a poor man who attracted the attention of 
Duke Cosimo III. of Florence, and was made by him his 
librarian. He had an extraordinary memory for the very 
words of the books he read. He amassed a library, which he 
bequeathed to Florence. 

Miran'dola was also a Florentine, a scholar who devoted 
himself, in the days of the Renaissance, to Plato. 

Page 12. Semper sihi sijnilis — Nature is ever the same 
to herself. "The gospel rule, yea or nay." See Matthew 
V. 37. 

Page 15. " There is no writing which has more electric 
power to unbind and animate the torpid intellect than the 
bold Eastern muse." Emerson is a signal example of the 
Western mind which has been stimulated by Oriental phi- 
losophy and literature. It was in his day that a great ac- 
cession of Eastern lore came to the West through the 
translations first made by Sir William Jones at the end 
of the last century, and followed by others, and his Poems 
especially show how he was magnetized by Orientalism. 

Uses of Great Men. 

This essay and the one following are from Representative 
Men, the fourth volume of Emerson's writings. The vol- 
ume opens with **Uses of Great Men," and, the doctrine 
being established, there follow essays on 

Plato ; or. The Philosopher. 
Swedenborg ; or. The Mystic. 
Montaigne ; or, The Skeptic. 
Shakspeare ; or. The Poet. 
Napoleon ; or. The Man of the World. 
Goethe ; or. The Writer. 

Page 17. Gautama, the founder of the Buddhists. 



NOTES. lOo 

Page 20. " Peu de moyens, beaucoup d'effet " = The less 
the means, the greater the effect. 

Page 22. Behmen (1575-1624) was a German mystic, 
and Swedenborg (1688-1772) was a Swedish philosopher 
whose doctrines were accepted by a society calling itself the 
New Church, but popularly known as Swedenborgians. The 
positive assertions of Swedenborg took a form as authorita- 
tive to many as a direct revelation from God, and in P^mer- 
son's early life the visions and views of Swedenborg found 
a ready acceptance among his neighbors. Emerson's paper 
on him is sympathetic and critical. 

Page 23. "Gilbert, or Swedenborg, or Oersted." Emer- 
son, in his writings, takes great delight in calling in the 
witness of great men to his doctrines. The list at the foot 
of the previous page is an example of his manner of calling 
up names. Oersted (or'sted) was a Danish electro-mag- 
netist (1777-1851). Gilbert may be Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 
the navigator and half-brother to Sir Walter Raleigh. 
Longfellow has sung in clear tones the stirring tale of Gil- 
bert's death. 

Page 25. '* Werners, Von Buchs, and Beaumonts . . . 
Berzeliuses and Davys." Here Emerson has made a group 
of scientists. Werner was a German mineralogist; Von Buch 
was a German geologist; Beaumont, lillie de Beaumont, a 
French geologist ; Berzelius, a Swedish chemist, and Sir 
Humphry Davy a noted English chemist, who invented the 
safety lamp. 

Page 27. " Clarendon's portraits." Edward Hyde, first 
Earl of Clarendon (1608-1674), was Lord Chancellor of 
England, but his greatest fame rests on his History of the 
Rebellion, which commences with the reign of Charles I. and 
concludes with the return of Charles II. in 1660. Its merit 
is less in its historical value than in its literary form, and its 



106 NOTES. 

admirable delineation of character. It was written unmis- 
takably from the royalist point of view, but is generous to 
the adversaries of the crown. 

Page 29. "Mathematical combination." There was a 
remarkable boy whom Emerson very likely had in mind, as 
he probably witnessed some of his feats, Zerah Colburn, 
who astonished New Englanders by his marvellous power of 
immediate computation of involved arithmetical problems. 

Page 34. Peau d'dne = ass's skin. 

Page 35. " Scourge of God " was the name applied to 
the Hunnish king Attila in the fifth century and to Genseric, 
king of the Vandals of the same period. Vespasian, the 
Roman emperor, was called the Darling of Mankind. 

Page 37. Thersites is the snarling scoffer in the Iliad 
who gets thumped for his harsh jesting. 

Page 41. A Cartesian, or follower of Descartes, a French 
philosopher of the seventeenth century. 

Page 42. Emerson wrote when the great immigration of 
the Irish to America was at the flood, and the peasants who 
came over were doing the hard work of making railroads, 
and fetching and carrying. As Saint Patrick was the patron 
saint of Ireland, Paddy became the playful name of the 
Irishman, as John of an Englishman and Jonathan of an 
American. 

Pestalozzi (pestalot'see) was a German schoolmaster who 
accomplished great reforms in educational matters. One 
of his reforms, which still has a lingering existence, was 
the monitor system, by which one pupil was set to teach 
another. 

Shakspeare ; OR, The Poet. 

It would be a capital exercise for one to annotate this 
essay by reference to other statements about Shakspeare, 



PD 33 



NOTES. 107 

which Emerson has made. The index in the final volume of 
the Riverside Edition will point to the passages where he is 
named. 

Page 54. Saadi, a Persian poet of the twelfth century, 
who furnished Emerson with a basis for more than one 
poem. 

Page 59. What was Ben Jonson's praise of Shakspeare ? 

Page 60. Here is a catalogue of worthies, and each man's 
history is worth searching out. Better still is it to know 
something of the work of each. 

Page 64. In what plays are the forest of Arden ? Scone 
castle ? Portia's villa ? 

Page 66. Talma was a French tragedian and contem- 
porary of Napoleon, who took kingly parts and had the air 
of an ancient statue. 

Social Aims. 

The second essay in the eighth volume, which bears the 
general title, Letters and Social Aims. 

Page 77. Hans Andersen's story is that entitled The Em- 
peror^s New Clothes. Emerson gets a new meaning out of 
the parable, but one that seems to ignore the actual fact of 
the story. 

Page 80. George Borrow, an Englishman, was an eccen- 
tric wanderer, who, with a commission as a colporteur, made 
vacy observations on life as he saw it from his vagrant point 
of view. He wrote The Bible in Spai7i, The Zincali, or an 
Account of the Gipsies in Spain, Lavengro, and other books. 

Page 84. The maxim quoted from George Herbert (1593- 
1632) is from that poet's The Church Porch. The whole 
stanza reads : — 

" In clothes, cheap handsomeness doth bear the bell, 
Wisdom 's a trimmer tiling than shop e'er grave. 
Say not then. This with that lace will do well ; 



108 NOTES. 

But, This with my discretion will be brave. 
Much curiousness is a perpetual wooing ; 
Nothing, with labor ; folly, long a doing." 

Page 89. The passage in Steele to which Emerson refers is 
in The Tatler, where Steele says of Lady Elizabeth Hast- 
ings : "Though her mien carries'much more invitation than 
command, to behold her is an immediate check to loose be- 
havior ; to love her was a liberal education." 

To the several commendations by Steele, Shenstone, Cole- 
ridge and Luther might be added De Quincey's observation, 
in his essay on Style, that the best letter-writing is by un- 
married Englishwomen above twenty-five, "who combine 
more of intelligence, cultivation and thoughtfulness, than 
any other [class] in Europe." 

Page 90. Coppet, not far from Geneva, in Switzerland, 
was the home of Madame de Stael's father, Baron Necker, 
and here she held her literary court. 

Page 98. Though Emerson does not name him, there is 
little doubt that this " American to be proud of " was Mr. 
John Murray Forbes, of Milton, Massachusetts, whose death 
in old age, in 1898, called out many tributes to the memory 
of a man of great force in politics, and especially in the war 
for the Union. 



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